Sentebale’s Trustee Letter Reveals Why the Board Turned on Sophie Chandauka

A previously unseen resignation letter, sent by the Sentebale’s former trustees to chairwoman Sophie Chandauka in March 2025, has now been made public by The Times. And it is devastating. Not because it is lurid or sensational, but because it methodically sets out a unanimous case that clashes with the narrative that Prince Harry was the problem.

The trustees did not resign over a petty disagreement or a bruised ego. They resigned because, in their own words, they had “significant concerns regarding your conduct” and believed Chandauka’s tenure was causing “adverse effects” on the charity. They asked her to step down. She refused. They called a board vote. She sought a High Court injunction to block it.

That is not the behaviour of a chairwoman acting in the best interests of vulnerable children in Lesotho and Botswana. And it is certainly not the behaviour of someone who can credibly claim later that she is the victim of a defamatory conspiracy.

What the letter actually says – and why it matters

Let the trustees’ own words do the heavy lifting here, because they are remarkably clear.

“The letter was sent when the board of trustees and Harry resigned in protest of Chandauka’s stewardship of the charity in March 2025. It has not been made public until now. The trustees said they had “unanimously decided to resign” after raising “significant concerns” about her conduct. They wrote that they had asked Chandauka to step down after months of “significant issues”, adding that this was “not a sudden decision” but one reached after sustained difficulties.

They alleged a “breakdown” in relationships with trustees, staff and major funders, and accused her of attempting to manipulate board minutes. They also claimed her tenure had an “adverse effect” on the charity. The letter also claims Chandauka responded to calls for her to step down by making “vague and deeply troubling allegations” to “threaten and intimidate the board, its patrons and a donor”. The trustees said these actions further “diminished trust” within the organisation.

The dispute intensified when she sought a High Court injunction to block a board meeting at which trustees planned to vote on her position. “There can be no more damning evidence of your failure to act as a leader capable of putting the charity’s best interests first,” the trustees wrote. They warned the situation had become “untenable” and said the charity faced “irreparable damage”. They added: “This attack from within threatens to destroy Sentebale for good.”

That is not vague, and nor was it “Harry told us to say this.” That was a board of trustees, people who signed up to support a charity, not to wage war on its chair, spelling out a sustained pattern of concern.

And then it gets worse. When the trustees tried to hold a formal vote on her position, Chandauka sought a High Court injunction to stop the meeting. The letter calls this “the most damning evidence of your failure to act as a leader capable of putting the charity’s best interests first.”

All of this unfolded before Harry or Mark Dyer said a word publicly. It also predated any so-called “media campaign.” The simple, uncomfortable truth is this: the trustees, the people legally responsible for governance, had lost confidence in Chandauka and wanted to act.

Why does this make the defamation case look stranger by the day

Now fast forward to April 2026. Sentebale, still under Sophie Chandauka’s leadership, is suing Prince Harry and former trustee Mark Dyer for defamation, claiming they orchestrated a “co-ordinated adverse media campaign” that damaged the charity’s reputation.

But this theory did not suddenly emerge from the court papers. Sophie was already advancing it in public on 29 March 2025, in her first major interview after the trustees stepped down. On Sky News, she claimed Harry had “authorised the release of a damaging piece of news” and said the “Sussex machine” had been unleashed on her and the charity, calling it “harassment and bullying at scale.” Months later, the Charity Commission would say it found no evidence of widespread or systemic bullying, harassment, misogyny or misogynoir, even as it criticised all sides for letting the dispute spill into public view.

The chair of a charity set up by Prince Harry has accused him of 'harassment and bullying at scale' by 'unleashing the Sussex machine' after he quit.

A source close to the former trustees of the Sentebale charity has described the claims as 'completely baseless'. pic.twitter.com/lmBLUXzFoO

— Sky News (@SkyNews) March 29, 2025

That chronology is critical. It suggests the current lawsuit is not simply about a later reputational attack discovered after the fact. It looks more like a legal escalation of a narrative Chandauka was already publicly promoting from the moment the governance breakdown became visible.

And that is where the resignation letter becomes so significant. The trustees formally recorded their concerns, shared them internally, and used them to ask the chair to step down. That makes the later defamation narrative harder to follow. A private governance letter explaining why a board is resigning is not the same thing as a public hit job. What the letter plainly shows is documentation of a serious internal dispute, not obvious malice. Whether and how that wider dispute later fed into the alleged media campaign is a question the current public record does not fully answer.

The Sophie–Tom Bower–Times narrative loop

Now, what does this letter do to the public story? Last month, Tom Bower published a serialised account in the Sunday Times that leaned heavily on Sophie Chandauka’s version of events. In that telling, Harry’s brand had become a fundraising problem, donors were wary of his Netflix work, and Meghan supposedly made matters worse.**

Now, only weeks later, The Times has published the trustees’ resignation letter. And the letter tells a different story. It shows that the board’s revolt was rooted in serious concerns about Chandauka’s conduct, not in some sudden Sussex tantrum or a vague dispute over Harry’s public image. The trustees say they resigned because of her leadership, and they make clear that Harry and Prince Seeiso were aligned with their position.

That is the point that matters. The documentary record is becoming harder to square with the simpler narrative that Harry was the source of the charity’s problems. The more evidence emerges, the more this looks like a governance collapse that some people later tried to reframe as a reputational attack.