News Nation’s gossip person, Paula Froelich, has had some bizarre royal exclusives in recent months. Last September, she made some wild claims that Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace obsessively watched everything Prince Harry and Meghan do and that the palaces weren’t happy with the Sussexes because King Charles and the Princess of Wales were both at death’s door. Then in November, Froelich’s sources insisted that Meghan “doesn’t know what she’s doing” with her Netflix cooking show and that it was likely that Netflix would “drop it.” This stroll down memory lane is sponsored by These People Don’t Know What They’re Talking About, in association with The Palace Is Still Briefing Against The Sussexes On a Daily Basis. Obviously, Froelich has an exciting new palace briefing/exclusive about NGN settling with Prince Harry this week.

Word that Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers (NGN) settled at the last minute with Prince Harry rocked the media world this week when Harry scored a major victory as the Sun newspaper not only admitted to hacking the Prince but apologized to him for his “torments”… and gave him, what I hear, was a whopping $12.3 million for his troubles.

After the case was settled on Wednesday, News Group Newspapers agreed to pay “substantial damages” for what it described as “the serious intrusion” by two of its flagship titles, the Sun and the News of the World. But there’s more to the settlement than meets the eye.

”They needed the money,” my insider said. “The way (Harry and Meghan) live, and the rate they spend, they would run out of cash sooner rather than later — and it’s not like anyone is running to hire them or give them more contracts. As they’ve proven time and time again, the only time they make money for people is when they’ve sold out his family and that cow has been milked.”

And I’m hearing it’s an insane amount of money — $12.3 million dollars (10 million GBP), which not only covers Harry’s legal fees, it also puts a chunk of change in his personal bank account. An insider added: “If he had been able to file in the United States the damages would have been a lot more, but since the crimes happened in the UK he couldn’t file here — and the UK rarely gives out massive amounts of money for damages.”

The cash is important as Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, live an expensive life. Their Montecito house was bought for $14.65 million and costs at least $500,000 to maintain a year (insurance, maintenance, taxes, etc). They also have a nearly $1 million annual security bill and both like expensive things like polo horses and private jets.

While they were rumored to have scored a $100 million deal from Netflix, only their docuseries “Harry & Meghan” scored any eyeballs. The other shows they created — “Heart of Invictus,” “Live to Lead” and Harry’s “Polo” — bombed… and there’s little hope that Meghan’s cookery show “With Love, Meghan” will do well.

”It’s completely contrived and so very 2004,” an insider said about Meghan’s upcoming show that was set to debut mid-January but was pushed back until March due to the LA wildfires. “She wants people to have a look inside her life but she didn’t even film inside her own home. And no one knows who these pretty people are she’s cooking for. It’s insane. The price of eggs is skyrocketing and she’s showing us how to put edible flowers in ice cubes — like that hasn’t been done before.”

Meanwhile, there are no more book offers (unless Harry does a sequel to his runaway hit “Spare” which, again, sold out his family), and while the numbers quoted about the Sussex’s projects were huge ($100 million for Netflix, $40 million for a series of books, $20 million for a Spotify deal) — those numbers are the CAP own what they would have made had all their projects been successful. Likely, the pair were given production support and marketing but would have only garnered big bucks if they’d met sales targets. Which they did not.

The couple’s publishing deal has gone by the wayside and the Spotify deal was canceled after just one year, with Spotify exec Bill Simmons calling the pair “grifters”.

[From News Nation]

The way I know some/all of this is coming from Buckingham Palace is because this is a near-constant storyline from Charles’s camp in particular: the money will run out at some point, and when the money runs out, then we’ll have Harry right where we want him. They’ve been saying that for five years, they’ve been trying to promise everyone that “Harry will crawl back, broke and divorced.” Anyway, this reads like the feverish rants of a courtier who knows nothing about how money, business or contracts work. The publishing deal has not “gone by the wayside” – Harry wrote one of the most wildly successful books of the decade, and I’m sure Penguin Random House would love a second book (and Harry should absolutely write it). Netflix seems happy with the Sussexes, and the money from their original contract hasn’t just disappeared. They have investments, they have other jobs, they’re doing fine. Harry didn’t “need” the settlement money. NGN needed to settle so that Harry wouldn’t reveal all of their criminal activity in open court.

Photos courtesy of Netflix.