Stop everything, hold the front page and break out the smelling salts: The Royalist is here to tell you exactly how and why the pictures of Harry and Meghan goofing around at the Kris Jenner/Kardashian party, which were posted online by the hosts, subsequently disappeared.
Turns out, the pics were scrubbed from the internet after a request was made by Harry and Meghan that images of them at the party were not published.
Just to rewind, the scene of the non-crime was Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez’s hilltop Xanadu, where Jenner celebrated her 70th with a Bond-themed bash.
Both Jenner and Kim Kardashian posted birthday party pictures—may the saints preserve us—and one frame featured Meghan smiling while others showed Harry hovering in the background.
Soon after, the frames were deleted.
Online, theories soon started to circulate, which can be boiled down to a) the Sussexes were snubbed by not being included, or b) the Sussexes got the pics taken down either because they i) didn’t look good or ii) because of the whole Remembrance Sunday context.
The truth, according to a source in Harry and Meghan’s camp with direct knowledge of the arrangements, is actually b) iii) – that Harry and Meghan, along with other guests, were asked beforehand if they consented to images of them at the party being shared and had said “no” (despite, perplexingly, apparently allowing themselves to be photographed arriving).
Photographic consent forms are now routine at high-octane gatherings, and the Sussexes, fully in line with Hollywood etiquette circa 2025, ticked “no” for inside shots.
Someone on the Jenner social team missed the memo, the shots went live, a klaxon sounded somewhere, and down they came.
I’m told Harry and Meghan were not particularly bothered by the photos being published, which is lucky, as they have now been saved by an army of Redditors. Turns out, deleting a post of your hubby looking daft on the world’s biggest digital megaphone produces the opposite of disappearance (the aged among us will know this as the Streisand Effect).
One camp read the removal as a Kardashian snow queen maneuver: icily excising the Sussexes from the narrative. Another cast it as a Sussex diktat, iron-fisted privacy czars bulldozing a harmless snap. A third group, more imaginative if not more accurate, decided it had to be a secret power struggle between America’s reigning celebrity monarchy and Britain’s expatriate one. All of these theories, alas, run aground on the dull reef of logistics. A form said no; a post said yes; and the form won after a brief skirmish.
The party coincided with Remembrance commemorations in the U.K. Harry wore a poppy, and the visual split screen—Hollywood sparkle in California, solemn ceremony in London—was always going to annoy a British audience.
In 2025, there is no such thing as a reversible post. Once you press publish from an account followed by hundreds of millions, you have not pinned a Polaroid to the fridge; you have issued a global press release.
If your guest list includes multiple public figures with differing appetites for exposure, consent tracking is not a courtesy, it’s infrastructure.
Fpor the Sussexes, the whole affair illustrates the perennial difficulty of living in one culture (celebrity America) while being measured by the values and rituals of another (the British royals).
Should you find yourself invited to a billionaires birthday bash, The Royalist suggests ticking ‘no’ to everything, arriving unseen and then just shrugging when the images leak out.
Way more chic.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source theroyalist.substack.com ’
