In November and December 2025, a claim (archived) circulated online that Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, went “off the rails” in court after a DNA test revealed he was not King Charles III’s son.
For example, on Nov. 30, 2025, one Facebook page posted a video that appeared to show Harry screaming as two people struggled to restrain him. The video caption read, “Prince Harry Goes Off the Rails in Court After Dismissing DNA Test: ‘My mother didn’t lie…'”
Other Facebook users shared the same claim (archived, archived, archived). Some of those posts featured links in top comments leading to advertisement-filled articles hosted by WordPress blogs. Snopes readers also wrote in, asking if the claim was true.
Searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo found no news media outlets reporting that Harry had taken a DNA test that showed the king was not his father (archived, archived, archived, archived). Prominent news media outlets would have widely reported this rumor, if true.
Additionally, though the video implied that some news media were allowed to witness Harry receiving the results of the alleged DNA test, we found no other photos of the event from reputable picture agencies like Getty Images that would have covered the event it if actually happened. The video itself showed signs of the use of artificial intelligence.
Given the above, we rate this claim false.
Video showed classic signs of AI
The video that accompanied the claim on Facebook postings appeared to be fake and had likely been generated using AI.
For example, though the person in the video showed a passing resemblance to Harry, recent photos from Getty Images showed the prince has blue eyes, while the video showed “Harry” with dark eyes.
The badge on the arm of the law enforcement official who appeared to restrain “Harry” (time code 0:02) did not appear to use letters from any known alphabet. Nonsense writing is a common sign of AI use in pictures and videos.
Additionally, the sound in the video was out of sync, as the sound of “Harry’s” scream came before his face appeared to make the corresponding expression.
Prince followed by speculation about parentage
Though this particular claim was false, Harry has long faced speculation about his parentage. He wrote in his 2023 autobiography, “Spare,” that “nearly every biography of me, every longish profile in a paper or magazine” touched on the long-standing rumor that Harry was the son of James Hewitt, a British cavalry officer who reportedly saw Harry’s mother, Princess Diana, for five years in the late 1980s.
Harry wrote in his memoir that Charles never addressed this rumor with him and that, “If Pa had any thoughts about Major Hewitt, he kept them to himself.”
Hewitt told the Sunday Mirror in 2002 that he was not Harry’s father, citing as evidence that Harry was “already a toddler” by the time he and Diana met in 1986. Harry was born Sept. 15, 1984.
Ken Wharfe, Diana’s former bodyguard, reportedly corroborated Hewitt’s claim in his 2002 book, “Diana: Closely Guarded Secret.” Wharfe wrote that “Diana did not meet James until the summer of 1986, and the red hair, gossips so love to cite as proof is, of course, a Spencer trait.” (Spencer was Diana’s maiden name.)
For further reading, Snopes previously reported on true claims that Harry partied with Diddy and Ye and dressed up as a Nazi for another party. We also looked into a claim that the BBC called “Spare” the “weirdest book ever written by a royal.”
