There’s absolutely no doubt that 2024 was a difficult year for the royal family with both Kate Middleton and King Charles being diagnosed with cancer and undergoing treatment. And for Prince William, that meant coping with both his wife and his father’s diagnoses at the same time – an unthinkable challenge that someone close to him is saying (understandably) brought him to a very “low” point.
More from CafeMom: Kate Middleton’s Cancer Diagnosis Made Prince William ‘More Open’ To Expressing His Love
As People reported, a former royal aide named Jason Knauf, who once worked with Will and Kate, appeared on 60 Minutes Australia on Sunday, opening up about the time he spent as a staffer until 2021. Though he left the job more than three years ago, Jason said he heard from William “within a couple weeks” of his dad and wife’s diagnoses.
“If you’re Prince William, you find out that both your wife and your father have cancer. And that is – I mean, I couldn’t believe it,” he said on the show.
He said that when William made an “absolutely awful” phone call to discuss the bad news, it was “the lowest I’ve ever seen him.” And unfortunately, the conspiracy theories about why Kate had been missing from the public eye for so long that were running rampant at the time only made the situation more difficult for Will.
“But the problem was that all this crazy, sort-of conspiracy theory stuff kicked off in the background online – ‘Was she really ill?’ But they didn’t want to say yet that she had cancer because they hadn’t told the children and were still working through how to tell the children,” Jason explained.
More from CafeMom: Prince William Is Being Touted as the ‘Reincarnation’ of Queen Elizabeth
Jason went on to say that, while working with Will and Kate, there were a lot of discussions about “how he and the princess were going to prepare their children for life in the public eye.”
Fortunately, now he believes that Will and Kate have a good handle on the kind of parents they want to be as they raise Prince George to be the future king and prepare Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis for life as senior royals.
“I definitely saw the worried mom and dad behind the scenes, but a lot less in recent years, which has been fantastic for them as a family,” he said.
