An author with former ties to the royal family has resurfaced a startling claim about one of its most established members.
Aatish Taseer, who dated Lady Gabriella of Windsor for three years in the early 2000s, addressed his revelation that Lady Gabriella’s mother, Princess Michael of Kent, owned a pair of pet black sheep she named after tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams.
“I think the [story about] Venus and Serena was part of that weird air of abstraction that exists around these people and how they’re not even aware of how shocking or offensive that might be,” Taseer, 44, said Monday, July 14, on the “Tell Me About Your Father” podcast.
Taseer first made the claim about Princess Michael of Kent, now 80, in a May 2018 piece in Vanity Fair titled “Palace & Prejudice.”
Biggest Royal Family Scandals Through the Years
Princess Michael of Kent is married to Prince Michael of Kent, 83, the son of Prince George, Duke of Kent and a grandson of King George V.
Us Weekly has reached out to representatives for Princess Michael of Kent and Buckingham Palace for comment.
Despite the allegation against his ex-girlfriend’s mother, Taseer said the pair used to have a special relationship.
“Princess Michael, I was very, very cozy with her,” he said on the podcast. “I would see her from time to time after Ella and I broke up. She came to my first book launch, and I would go and see her in England.”
However, after Taseer got married to a man — the writer tied the knot with his husband, Ryan Davis, in August 2015 — he said things shifted with him and Princess Michael.
“I think once I came out and was married to a man, then it kind of, I don’t know. It’s one of those situations where it must have felt like a betrayal of our time together, even though it hadn’t felt like that [for me],” Taseer explained. “I always had relationships with men.”
He added, “There wasn’t a real moment of transformation or a clean break or something. But it kind of suddenly recast our time together.”
Princess Michael’s alleged reluctance to accept his new lifestyle was a shame, Taseer said, because he always thought of her as “kind of a gay icon.”
Podcast cohost Matt Philip joked, “If she wasn’t so racist, she’d be really marketable.”
Princess Michael of Kent previously came under fire when she wore a brooch with a Black man’s face on it for a luncheon with Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, in December 2017.
Inside the Royal Family’s Turbulent Years: From Health Crises to Meghan’s Exit
“Princess Michael is very sorry and distressed that [the brooch] has caused offense,” a spokesperson stated at the time.
The Princess also allegedly told a group of Black diners in New York City to “go back to the colonies” in 2014. In an interview with ITV after the alleged incident, she said, “To call me racist, it’s a knife through the heart because I really love these people.”
Given his history of writing about the royal family and airing some of their alleged dirty laundry along the way, Taseer said he’s not hopeful about a reconciliation anytime soon.
“The cardinal sin in England is indiscretion,” he said. “They never come out with it, but there’s really no crime you can commit greater than that. And I was extremely indiscreet.”
