Has the dust finally settled on the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s attendance at Kris Jenner’s 70th birthday party two Saturdays ago? Every single day since the party, there was a new controversy, a new exclusive report on what really happened, a new contradiction on why Kris Jenner and Kim Kardashian posted-then-deleted photos of the Sussexes at the party. I still don’t know exactly what happened and I kind of wonder if we’ll eventually get Kim and Kris’s version of events.

This is how it stands now: Harry and Meghan seemingly had no problem being photographed by paparazzi as they entered and exited the party, which was held at Jeff Bezos’ LA mansion. They weren’t hiding, they weren’t mad at the paps, they just walked in and out. Inside the event, they posed for photos with the official party photographers, and those photos were posted on Kim and Kris’s Instagram accounts. Then, hours later, the photos of Harry and Meghan were removed. At first, the story was “oh, Harry and Meghan checked ‘no’ on the consent forms.” Then the Kardashians (?) pushed back and said there were no consent forms. And sources now say that Harry & Meghan did request that the K-Js remove the photos. Tom Sykes called all of this Harry & Meghan’s “week from hell.” A bit melodramatic, but sure.

[After the Kardashian-Jenners deleted the Sussex photos], briefings from the Sussex camp began wafting into journalists’ inboxes. The couple, it was said, had been presented with consent forms before the party and had ticked the “no social media” box. The implication was that someone on Kim and Kris’s social team had made a mistake posting the images, and had now simply honored their clearly stated wishes and removed them.

The Sussexes’ shambolic operation had underestimated how ruthlessly efficient the Kardashians’ one is. Reps for the family flatly told anyone who asked that no such forms existed. There were no consent forms, they said. None. Why the rapid rebuttal? Because their team understands that when people lie about teeny-tiny things, the mind naturally wanders to what they might do when the stakes are higher.

When reporters went back to the Sussex camp to clarify how this squared with the previous narrative, the shutters came down. The talkative sources abruptly stopped talking. There would be no further comment on this ridiculous little flap.

On one level, it was all delightfully trivial. On another, as the week rolled on, it began to look like the purest distillation yet of the Sussex problem: a couple who have made “truth” their brand appearing to bend reality over something as petty as party optics.Because whatever did or did not happen with paperwork, one fact is beyond dispute: Harry and Meghan asked for the pictures to be taken down.

The interesting question is why their camp then felt compelled to erect such a brittle justification, one that could be knocked down in a single phone call to a Kardashian publicist. Why not just say nothing? Why produce a story that could be disproved?

So why take the pictures down? A former colleague at the Invictus Games told me that Harry was right to fear the downside, saying that being seen to “hobnob with the Kardashians” in Remembrance week was dangerous for his position at the charity, which, some say, is under threat.

This raises the fascinating possibility that Harry—who told us just last week that social media was run by evil men trying to steal our children’s minds—was also told they had ticked “no” on consent forms to get him to go to a party attended by Mark Zuckerberg.

By the end of the working week, with the Kardashians having effectively accused them of fabricating stories, the Sussexes’ relationship with the truth was under fresh scrutiny. The phantom consent form neatly plugged into existing doubts: the Oprah claim that they were secretly married three days before their Windsor wedding, later refuted by the Archbishop of Canterbury; the late queen’s coldly devastating response to their racism allegations— “recollections may vary.”

[From The Daily Beast]

“The Oprah claim that they were secretly married three days before their Windsor wedding…” While Meghan did use the word “married,” she clearly described the fact that she and Harry recited their vows to each other days before the actual wedding. Anyone who actually watched the Oprah interview understood what she meant. That incident is an example not of “Sussex lies,” but of how people climb up Meghan’s ass and put words into her mouth constantly over anything and nothing. Now, all that being said, I do wonder if this party-photo situation was poorly handled on the Sussexes’ end. It was all so unnecessary, and such an unforced error if they did ask for the photo removals. That being said, it’s also being blown up by royalist crisis actors – if not the removed photos, it would have been something else, obviously.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Kris Jenner’s Instagram and Kim Kardashian’s Instagram.