HE’S the royal expert who is making the headlines as well as writing them.
Omid Scobie has found himself at the centre of a furore after two members of the Royal Family were named in a Dutch translation of his book Endgame.
The rumpus brings fresh focus on Scobie, 42, who has previously come under fire for fibbing about his age and taking a private plane.
He started his career on Heat magazine where he became pals with Katie Price’s glamour model rival Jodie Marsh and once ran a K-pop entertainment website.
Scobie lives a lavish lifestyle, holidaying at luxury hotels on the back of his first book about The Sussex’s, Finding Freedom – and is likely to make a killing from revealing more royal tidbits in Endgame.
Yet his family have close ties to the Baha’i faith, a belief system founded in the 19th century by Iranian aristocrat Bahá’u’lláh, which warns against gossip and scurrilous tittle tattle.
Under an article titled The Worst Human Trait: Gossip and Backbiting, Bahaiteachings.org states: “The Baha’i teachings treat few subjects more emphatically and uncompromisingly than the spiritual requirement to abstain from fault-finding, backbiting, and gossip.
“This constant and consistent societal drumbeat of backbiting and gossip, so heartless, corrosive and spiritually harmful, hurts both the recipient and the originator.”
Omid’s Scottish-born father Bill was a director of the Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Oxford from 1992 to 2000 and again between 2001 and 2006, while his mother also had two stints as a director.
Scobie himself confirmed he is Baha’i in a 2019 tweet and follows several Baha’i Instagram accounts. In April 2016 he tweeted a picture after visiting Delhi’s Baha’i Lotus Temple in India, saying: “Feeling very calm after a visit to deli’s bahai lotus temple.”
The former showbiz reporter has taken swipes at the Royal Family in Endgame, claiming King Charles is so fussy he has his shoelaces ironed, the Prince of Wales colludes with the press to undermine brother Harry and the Princess of Wales is too terrified to do anything but grin for press photographs.
It’s a damning indictment of Britain’s best-loved family and Scobie has been accused of being Meghan’s ‘mouthpiece’.
He has denied being close to the Sussexes, saying he is not a friend but, whatever the truth, his royal connections are a far cry from his upbringing.
The 42-year-old author was raised in Oxford where his dad worked in marketing and his mum Maryam in child welfare.
His father’s family is Scottish, and his mother is Persian. He told Tatler he is particular about saying Persian not Iranian, “because to Persians there’s a big difference”.
He attended fee-paying Magdalen College School, whose alumni include Skyfall director Sam Mendes, before going to a state-funded sixth form college where he made a close group of friends he is still in touch with.
After school Scobie studied journalism at the London College of Communication before bagging a job on Heat magazine when he was 21.
As a junior reporter he accompanied model Jodie Marsh, once described as ‘human Viagra’ by a lover, to nightclubs and interviews.
He later claimed he hated the job and suffered racism in a ‘toxic’ workplace.
He wrote on X (formerly Twitter) earlier this year: “The continued fascination some people have with my first job is bizarre. I worked at Heat magazine for 11 months after university (20 years ago!) and I quickly grew to hate it.”
Scobie alleged his immediate boss called him p*** as a joke and made ‘racist slurs’ against other TV celebrities including June Sarpong and Alison Hammond.
He says he complained but the HR department told him: “That’s just (their) humour.”
On X, Omid continued: “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.”
While Endgame has been blasted as a work of fiction by critics, including The Sun columnist Piers Morgan, Scobie recently admitted telling a little white lie.
He admitted fibbing about his age because he “felt insecure about turning 40”.
The biographer claimed in a 2020 interview with The Times that he was 33 when he was actually 38.
This week, he said it was an “unfortunate and naive” move, explaining he had a “little insecurity” before adding: “You learn from those mistakes. I can’t do much more than own it.”
Baby-faced Scobie says people are “obsessed” with whether he has had plastic surgery – but insists he hasn’t.
He admitted trying Botox “many years ago” and also has a nonsurgical skin-tightening procedure called Ultherapy, which costs up to £1,500 a time.
He said: “I’ve not been under the knife, not done anything crazy. People are obsessed.”
Scobie was also once caught out on a fib about using a private plane.
He said he never used private jets until a Times writer pointed out he’d seen a recent photo of him taking a flight on his Instagram.
“Okay, that was a private jet,” he admitted. “But that was only going from LA to Palm Springs. It was very short.”
The picture later vanished from his account.
After Heat, Scobie joined entertainment magazine US weekly, working for its London outpost where he started covering the Royal Family.
He also started a K-pop entertainment website IdolWow! in 2012, in which he talked about ‘crotch shots’ and a Korean star’s ‘bootylicious curves’.
The site was wound up in April 2015, according to Companies House.
Scobie, now editor-at-large at Harper’s Bazaar and a royal contributor at ABC News and Good Morning America, says he was “drawn” to the love story between Prince Harry and Meghan.
He later said: “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 in the palace feel they can come to when they need to correct a story.”
He first met Meghan at the 2015 Toronto Fashion Week and says the Duchess personally phoned him three years after he was sent threats on social media, according to Endgame
Scobie was one of just three journalists invited to Meghan’s final solo appearance as a working royal in the 1844 Room at Buckingham Palace, where he says they shared a “big farewell hug.”
He told Tatler: “I think she wanted to share that last moment because it’s a moment in history. But also to do it in an environment she felt safe in.”
Despite this, he insists he is not a mouthpiece for the couple – or even a friend of Meghan.
He claims they have “mutual friends” who help with information for his books.
Certainly, Scobie has made serious cash from his first biography about Megxit, Finding Freedom, which sold 31,000 copies in the first five days.
His Instagram is littered with pictures of luxury holidays in France, Croatia, Hong Kong and Morocco, where he stays in upmarket hotels.
The author is thought to now live in Los Angeles and has frequented celebrity hang outs like the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills and Nobu in Malibu.
He also has a love of designer clothes and accessories by the likes of Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Balenciaga.
Scobie says he is single but shares his life with his beloved French bulldog Yoshi, named after the Super Mario character.
He once turned up at a Tatler interview with Yoshi by his side who, according to the interviewer, “was lapping up water from a bowl his master produced from a Burberry man bag”.
