Prince Harry co-founded Sentebale in 2006 when he was 21 years old, named it after a word in the Sesotho language that means forget me not, and said it was a tribute to Princess Diana, who had died nine years earlier when Harry was 12.
Twenty years after he built it, the charity is suing him for defamation in London’s High Court.
The case, Sentebale v Duke of Sussex and another, was filed on March 24, 2026. Court records became public on April 10.
Harry is named as a defendant alongside Mark Dyer, his longtime friend and a former trustee of the charity. Court filings categorize the claim under libel and slander.
No court documents were available, so the specific statements alleged to constitute defamation have not been made public.
What Sentebale has said publicly is this: “The charity seeks the court’s intervention, protection and restitution following a coordinated adverse media campaign conducted since 25 March 2025 that has caused operational disruption and reputational harm to the charity, its leadership and its strategic partners.”
The charity went further, naming Harry and Dyer directly as “the architects of that adverse media campaign, which has had significant viral impact and triggered an onslaught of cyber-bullying directed at the charity and its leadership.”
Harry’s spokesperson responded on Friday. The statement said he and Dyer “categorically reject these offensive and damaging claims.”
It also said:
“It is extraordinary that charitable funds are now being used to pursue legal action against the very people who built and supported the organization for nearly two decades, rather than being directed to the communities the charity was created to serve.”
What Is Sentebale?
Sentebale was never a minor patronage or a name attached to a ribbon-cutting. Harry helped build it from the ground up.
The co-founder was Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, and the two men founded it explicitly in honor of their respective late mothers, Diana, who had become a prominent global advocate for people living with HIV, and Seeiso’s mother Queen Mamohato.
The charity focuses on young people living with HIV in Lesotho and Botswana, operating outreach programs and a purpose-built center. Since 2010 alone, its annual Polo Cup has raised over £11 million.
After Harry’s public break from the British royal family in 2020, when he and his wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, stepped back from senior royal duties and eventually relocated to California, he retained only a small number of private patronages.
Sentebale was among the most prominent of those he kept. For someone whose relationship with institutional Britain had become openly hostile, Sentebale was the clearest remaining evidence that Harry was still engaged with serious humanitarian work.
It was where his credibility as an activist rather than simply a celebrity was most grounded.
How It All Fell Apart
The dispute did not appear overnight. It began taking shape in 2023, when disagreements emerged at the charity over a new fundraising strategy.
Sophie Chandauka, a corporate finance lawyer, was appointed as the voluntary chairwoman of Sentebale’s board that same year.
The tension escalated significantly in April 2024 when Harry brought a Netflix camera crew to a Sentebale fundraiser.
Chandauka later criticized that decision publicly, saying the film crew interfered with the charity’s primary mission.
She also objected to an unplanned appearance at the same fundraiser by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, which became its own source of friction.
Chandauka also claimed Harry had asked her to defend Meghan from negative publicity, a claim Harry’s side did not address specifically.
By early 2025 the situation had reached a breaking point. In February 2025 Chandauka privately raised what she described as governance concerns.
Then in March 2025, everything became public. The trustees resigned from Sentebale when Chandauka refused their demand that she step down.
Harry and Prince Seeiso then resigned as patrons in solidarity with the departing trustees, saying in a joint statement that the relationship between the board and Chandauka had “broke down beyond repair, creating an untenable situation.”
Chandauka’s response was swift and pointed. She told Sky News that Harry’s resignation had blindsided her entirely and described it as “an example of harassment and bullying at scale.”
She said he had released damaging information to the press without informing her or the charity’s executive director.
She said he had interfered with a whistleblower complaint she filed. Her broader allegations included what she described as “abuse of power, bullying, harassment, misogyny, misogynoir.”
She also said, more directly:
“There are people in this world who behave as though they are above the law and mistreat people, and then play the victim card and use the very press they disdain to harm people who have the courage to challenge their conduct.”
What Has The Investigation Found?
The Charity Commission for England and Wales investigated. In August 2025 it published its findings.
The commission found no evidence of widespread or systemic bullying or harassment, including the misogyny and misogynoir Chandauka had alleged.
It also found no evidence of overreach by either Chandauka or Harry as patron.
It cited weak governance, criticized the charity’s lack of clarity in delegating authority to its chair, which it said allowed misunderstandings to occur, and rebuked all parties for allowing an internal dispute to become public and harm the charity’s reputation and standing.
Commission CEO David Holdsworth said:
“Sentebale’s problems played out in the public eye, enabling a damaging dispute to harm the charity’s reputation, risk overshadowing its many achievements, and jeopardizing the charity’s ability to deliver for the very beneficiaries it was created to serve.”
Harry’s spokesperson criticized the report at the time. Chandauka welcomed it. The commission indicated that Chandauka could remain in place alongside the current board going forward.
The lawsuit filed in March 2026, approximately one year after Harry and Seeiso’s public resignation, suggests that whatever the commission’s report resolved, it did not resolve the underlying hostility between Sentebale’s current leadership and its two departed founders.
Where Does Prince Harry Currently Stand?
For most of the past three years, Harry has been one of the more active litigants in British courts, and consistently on the side filing the claims.
He sued Mirror Group Newspapers and Associated Newspapers over allegations of phone hacking and unlawful information gathering by journalists and private investigators they employed.
He pursued the UK Home Office over its decision to withdraw his police protection, arguing the decision endangered his family.
As recently as January 2026 he was at London’s High Court leading a group of claimants accusing the Daily Mail’s publisher of privacy invasion.
In all of those cases, Harry has framed his use of the courts as a matter of principle, holding a press he describes as toxic and abusive accountable for its actions, protecting his family from what he argues are the same institutional forces that contributed to his mother’s death.
Litigation, in Harry’s telling, has been the tool of the principled outsider fighting systems that operate above the law.
Now those same courts have a case in which Harry is the defendant, and the plaintiff is the charity he created in his mother’s name.
The specific statements he is alleged to have made that crossed into defamation remain sealed from public view.
What is public is that Sentebale believes those statements caused real and quantifiable harm to the organization, and that it is prepared to argue that case before a judge.
Harry categorically rejects the claims. Sentebale says legal action was necessary.
The case is in the High Court. The word Sentebale chose, twenty years ago when Harry named the charity after something Diana meant to him, was forget me not.
