Chelsy Davy became a regular in the tabloids for her relationship with Prince Harry, a romance full of ups and downs and media harassment that ended in an excellent relationship of friends.
These days, Prince Harry is in London. The Duke of Sussex visits the English capital to testify in the trial he is holding against the communication group Mirror Group Newspapers for, according to him, having carried out illegal wiretapping. The prince alleges that more than 140 articles were published by his newspapers between 1996 and 2010 because his phone was tapped.
In these conversations, the youngest son of Princess Diana and King Charles III spoke with his brother, with his friends, and with his girlfriend for years, Chelsy Davy. According to Sherborne, the prince's lawyer, the articles published due to the alleged illegal eavesdropping of these conversations led to the end of the relationship in addition to causing depressive episodes.
Who is Chelsy Davy and how did she appear in Harry's life?
In the 1990s, Chelsy Davy appeared every day in the British tabloids. At the Polo, her at a wedding, her clubbing in Chelsea every night. Chelsy was Harry's most famous and longest partner, in a relationship full of ups and downs, and the one who suffered the most harassment from the press, who spied on her and even placed a search device in her car. Harry even feared for his life, as he recounts in his memoirs, "In the Shadow", and as he has exposed before the judge these days in London, where his complaints against the press group to which "The Mirror" belongs are being examined. for espionage.
After her breakup, in 2011, Harry and Chelsy have remained friends and the young woman attended her wedding with Meghan Markle, along with another of Harry's exes, actress Cressida Bonas. Today Chelsy is a happy family mother. In January of this year, she gave birth, at the age of 36, to her first child, Leo. No one outside of her inner circle knew that she was pregnant and they didn't even know who her father was.
The public exposure of her became unbearable to him. That's why, since her breakup with the prince, she has tried to stay out of focus. He gave only a couple of interviews, to Tatler and The Times, and cut himself off from most of the friends he had during that time. Almost no one has seen her again in these years and they don't even know what circles she frequents today. She has fiercely protected her private life in this new stage.
A teenage crush of Prince Harry
Harry and Chelsy were just teenagers when they met in 2004. Chelsy was born in 1985 in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and grew up in Victoria Falls. She was the daughter of a wealthy South African businessman, Charles Davy, and a former model, Beverly Donald Davy, who had won the Miss Rhodesia beauty pageant.
Chelsy's father ran a huge game reserve, where Chelsy grew up free, playing barefoot with baby buffalo and the monkeys, who took away her tennis balls. The family lost everything when President Robert Mugabe came to power. At the age of 14, Chelsy was then asked to travel to England to study at a boarding school. She enrolled at Cheltenham Ladies'College and then at Stowe Secondary School. It was there that she met Harry.
He noticed her during a polo match. When she finished high school, Chelsy returned to Africa to enroll at the University of Cape Town. She graduated in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. A few months after she left England, Harry invited her to a dinner at the British Consulate in Cape Town, where he was spending a few days with some of her friends.
At first, they were just friends. Chelsy then decided to return to England to study a two-year law course at the University of Leeds and, surely, to be closer to Harry. The prince has always described her as "different." She was a free girl, without prejudice, who didn't care about royalty. Harry was shocked.
They became a couple of the moment. Chelsy fascinated the press because she was spontaneous, "cool" and very different from the modest girl Harry should have chosen. Chelsy liked to have fun, she wasn't scared of the paparazzi posted outside clubs or in the stands at polo matches. She always wore miniskirts, and she was smiling and happy.
She was the opposite of the delicate and cautious Kate Middleton. Chelsy joined Harry's exclusive group of friends, which included nightclub businessman Guy Pelly, aristocrat Natasha Rufus Isaacs and banker Tom "Skippy" Inskip, one of Harry's closest childhood companions. They met in Club H, the basement of Highgrove, the country residence of Prince Charles, where the two Windsor brothers held parties.
Harry and Chelsy's relationship was going "in crescendo." They went on vacation to South Africa with her family. Later she was invited to Prince Charles' 60th birthday. It was Chelsy who was with Harry at the Princess Diana Memorial Concert in 2007.
They were deeply in love. And all observers agreed. She was Harry's, true love. Fun and loyal. But the relationship began to crack. Chelsy began working at the prestigious Allen & Overy City law firm and, even though she went out less and less, only the photos of the half-drunk young woman leaving the nightclubs made it to the newspapers.
They claimed that she surpassed Harry in his ability to party. Popular newspapers hired detectives to follow her and get all the dirty information they could get on her. Abortions, diseases, ex-partners... she became an obsession for the tabloids and some of these researchers have acknowledged, under anonymity, that hacking her voicemail was a common practice. Chelsy would talk to her friends when she was dating Harry.
From monopolizing spotlights to anonymity
However, despite her image, Chelsy was a very private person and she did what she could to survive that degree of scrutiny. In an interview with The Times newspaper, in 2016, she stated: «She was something crazy and very scary. It was very difficult for me to deal with it. Could not. Was young. She was trying to be a normal girl and it was horrible ». Harry tried to talk about it, but without much success, in an interview for his 21 years: «I see how hurt she was. My girlfriend is someone very special to me and she has been through very hard times ». Even after their breakup, journalists continued to harass her.
It seems that it was the wedding of William and Kate, in 2011, that ended up scaring Chelsy away when she saw the informational madness that being part of the royal family meant. She seems to have told Harry that she couldn't see herself making any of the sacrifices Kate had made, molding her life to the attention of journalists. Following the breakup, Chelsy returned to Zimbabwe, before heading back to London to live a very low-key life. She started her own business in 2016, an African jewelry brand called Aya, which today also incorporates elements of lifestyle and travel.
But her friendship with Harry continued. Chelsy attended her and Meghan's wedding in 2018. They no longer frequent the same circles. She has surrounded herself with close friends, including Lady Melissa Percy, whom she met through Harry, and Irene Forte, daughter of hotelier Rocco Forte, who was the first to learn of her relationship with Sam Cutmore-Scott, 37, the father of her son, and with whom she began dating in 2019. She lives with Cutmore-Scott in a Victorian-style house in the wealthy Chiswick neighborhood, west London.
Little is known of them, but it appears that they have been married. Cuttmore-Scott is a successful hotel entrepreneur, having studied at Eton and Oxford. He runs his parents' company, Bijou Collection, dedicated to celebrating weddings in exclusive locations, and a hotel in Norfolk. Her son Leo was born in London in January.
