An ugly rift between Prince Harry and a leader of a charity he co-founded escalated on Sunday after the leader, Sophie Chandauka, accused the prince of engaging in harassment and bullying to try to force her out of her post.
Ms. Chandauka said that when Harry abruptly resigned last week as the patron of the charity, Sentebale, it was calculated to damage the organization after he failed to oust her from her post as the chair of its board of trustees.
“Can you imagine what that attack has done for me, on me, and the 540 individuals in the Sentebale organizations and their family?” Ms. Chandauka said in an interview with the British broadcaster Sky News. “That is an example of harassment and bullying at scale.”
A spokesman for Harry and his wife, Meghan, declined to comment on Ms. Chandauka’s latest claims, which she made on the Sky News program “Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips.”
Sentebale was co-founded by the prince in 2006 to honor his late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, and to raise money to help young victims of the H.I.V. pandemic in Lesotho. It has expanded operations to nearby Botswana and works on issues ranging from substance abuse and gender-based violence to climate change, and how they affect young people.
Harry, who is also known as the Duke of Sussex, announced his resignation, alongside the charity’s co-founder, Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, last Wednesday, saying that the relationship between the board of trustees and Ms. Chandauka had ruptured irretrievably. Five of the board’s nine members had resigned earlier in the week.
Their departures followed a mounting series of conflicts between the board and Ms. Chandauka. The five board members had asked her to resign, saying they had lost “trust and confidence” in her.
“It is devastating that the relationship between the charity’s trustees and the chair of the board broke down beyond repair, creating an untenable situation,” Harry and Prince Seeiso said in a joint statement when they announced their resignation. “We are in shock that we have to do this, but we have a continued responsibility to Sentebale’s beneficiaries.”
The dispute between board members and Ms. Chandauka has landed in an English court and with Britain’s Charity Commission, which regulates charities in England and Wales. Both sides have filed claims of wrongdoing. Although Sentebale operates in southern Africa, it is registered in Britain.
Ms. Chandauka, a Zimbabwe-born lawyer who has worked for Morgan Stanley and the technology company Meta, was named as Sentebale’s chair in July 2023 and had previously served as a trustee from 2009 to 2015.
Among the examples of mistreatment cited by Ms. Chandauka on Sky was an awkward incident, caught on video, after a polo match to raise money for the charity in Miami last April. During the presentation of awards onstage, Meghan appeared to ask Ms. Chandauka to switch places from her position next to Harry. That required her to duck under a trophy as she moved to stand next to Meghan, also known as the Duchess of Sussex, prompting news organizations to raise questions about Meghan’s behavior.
“Prince Harry asked me to issue some sort of a statement in support of the duchess, and I said I wouldn’t,” Ms. Chandauka said. “Not because I didn’t care about the duchess, but because I knew what would happen if I did so, No. 1. And No. 2, because we cannot be an extension of the Sussexes.”
Ms. Chandauka said the site of the polo match had already been moved because Harry insisted on bringing a camera crew that was filming a documentary for Netflix, with which the couple has a production deal.
Ms. Chandauka said that the drama surrounding the split between Harry and Meghan and the British royal family had become the greatest risk to the charity. As tensions with Sussexes mounted, she said, she had been a victim of “this unleashing of the Sussex machine,” referring to Harry’s public relations team.
For all her charges, Ms. Chandauka said her relationship with Harry had generally been “fantastic.” But she said, “There are some individuals on the board who thought they could get away with mistreating a woman.”