Omid Scobie’s colourful career started as a celebrity reporter in a job he hated before his rapid rise into the public eye as Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s ‘cheerleader-in-chief’.
The royal writer’s ill-fated 11 month stint at Heat magazine after leaving university was the start of fulfilling a childhood dream of becoming a journalist.
Two decades later he is now on the cusp of releasing his second explosive royal book Endgame, following 2020’s biography of the Sussexes Finding Freedom.
Scobie himself has a checkered past from hitting the nightclubs with Katie Price’s rival Jodie Marsh to being the founder of a now defunct seedy K-Pop website.
But how did Scobie rise the ranks so quickly to become one of the most talked about royal correspondents and Meghan and Harry’s favoured journalist?
Who is Omid Scobie and how old is he?
Scobie grew up in Oxford and is the eldest of two brothers. His Scottish father, Bill, runs a marketing agency. His Persian mother, Maryam, works in child welfare.
Scobie studied at prestigious fee-paying Magdalen College School whose alumni includes Skyfall director Sam Mendes.
He then went to state sixth form Cherwell School before studying journalism at the London College of Communication.
Scobie is now 42 years old but he was caught lying in an interview with The Times Magazine in 2020 when he said he was 33, six years younger than his actual age.
He recently told The Times: ‘That was unfortunate and naive of me,’ he says. ‘You live and learn.’
What did Omid Scobie do before becoming a Royal biographer?
Upon leaving university aged 21, Scobie bagged a role at Heat magazine where he worked for 11 months.
It was not a happy stamping ground for the journalist though and he ‘quickly grew to hate it’ describing it as a ‘toxic workplace’.
He made a series of allegations on X claiming his former boss called him a ‘P****’ as a ‘joke’ and made ‘racist slurs’ against other TV celebrities June Sarpong and Alison Hammond.
He wrote: ‘…not one person there, including the publisher’s HR department, gave a damn. “That’s just [their] humour,” I was told by one superior at the time.’
He added: ‘Despite people’s intentions, I’m not ashamed of that job. At 21-years-old, it was a blast covering red carpets every day and doing celebrity interviews.’
It is here where he wrote about another woman getting a rough ride from the British tabloids; Jodie Marsh.
The glamour model was once described as ‘human Viagra’ by a lover and famously traded vicious insults with her rival, Katie Price, then known as Jordan.
As a junior reporter, Scobie cultivated Jodie by accompanying her to nightclubs. And she was more than happy to grace the front cover of Heat.
From there he joined entertainment magazine US Weekly where the seeds of his interest in the royals would be sown.
‘The royals in the US are big business. And US Weekly being the second most read weekly in the US was appealing to [the royals], too,’ he told Tatler in 2021 as he detailed of how he was rebuffed when he joined the royal press pack.
He added: ‘The first words I remember hearing were that this guy was going to come and write puff pieces and he doesn’t know what he’s doing.’
Scobie stayed at US Weekly for a decade before he was royal editor-at-large at Harpar’s Bazaar.
He is also royal contributor at ABC News and regularly appears on Good Morning America.
In 2012 he started seedy K-Pop entertainment news website IdolWow!.
Back in 2015, in an article on the website, it noted creepily that Korean rapper Hyuna’s video ‘is littered with close up crotch shots in barely-there hot pants that show off the 23-year-old girl group star’s bootylicious curves’.
It added that ‘at one point the brunette idol even squeezes her breasts together at the camera’.
Scobie launched IdolWow! to cover the South Korean pop – or K-pop – global phenomenon, which combines attractive singers, addictive melodies and slick choreography.
The site was wound up in April 2015, according to accounts on Companies House.
How does Omid Scobie know Meghan Markle and Prince Harry?
Scobie began reporting on the royals on 2011 and admitted before then he had ‘no personal interest in the royals at all whatsoever’.
Five years later when Meghan’s relationship with Harry dominated the headlines and he found himself being pulled towards their story.
‘I was going to work my damn hardest to make sure I was close to every single person in their lives, and become someone that, at the very least, people at the palace feel they can come to when they need to correct a story,’ he told The Times.
In March 2020 he wrote a first-hand account of the day Meghan finally flew out of England following her last solo appearance as a working Royal.
He told readers of Harper’s Bazaar that he gave her a ‘goodbye hug’ at Buckingham Palace, later adding that ‘tears that the Duchess had been bravely holding back’ were ‘free to flow’.
In the same fulsome article, he described shadowing the Sussexes’ work, ‘getting to know the couple better through their humanitarian endeavours, engagements and overseas visits’.
He wrote: ‘Their high-energy work ethic and passion for social justice attracted a new, more diverse demographic of royal watcher. As a young(ish), biracial royal correspondent, the change was exciting. And as their popularity grew around the world, so did a new golden era for the House of Windsor.’
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