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Prince Harry and Meghan Markle fired off a barrage of explosive allegations against the royal family and the British press in the new episodes of their Netflix documentary Harry & Meghan released Thursday.
Most seriously, Harry says he blames the media for causing his wife’s July 2020 miscarriage after Britain’s Mail on Sunday reported details from a private letter sent by Meghan to her estranged father, Thomas Markle.
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“I believe my wife suffered a miscarriage because of what the Mail did,” Harry says. “I watched the whole thing. Now do we absolutely know that the miscarriage was caused by that? Of course we don’t, but bearing in mind the stress that that caused, the lack of sleep, and the timing of the pregnancy—how many weeks in she was—I can say from what I saw that miscarriage was created by what they were trying to do to her.”
Harry also alleged that the Mail on Sunday would have felt emboldened to run the private message because, he claims, the newspaper “knew the [royal] family would encourage us not to sue.” Meghan and Harry said they pressed royal legal counsel to take action but they dragged their feet for months. The couple eventually took their own legal advice—turning to lawyer Jenny Afia for help.
In one sequence, Afia makes the startling claim that she has “seen evidence that there was negative briefing against Harry and Meghan by the Palace to suit other people’s agendas.”
“There’s a narrative that the royal family adopt a ‘never complain, never explain’ approach to the media, and I think Meghan went along with that for a long period,” Afia says. “But there was a real kind of war against Meghan.”
“Meg became this scapegoat for the Palace, and so they would feed stories on her whether they were true or not to avoid other less favourable stories being printed,” Meghan’s friend Lucy Fraser, a PR executive, adds.
Meghan says the subsequent litigation against the Mail on Sunday was the “catalyst, probably, for all of the unraveling” of the relationship with the royal family.
Meghan says her relationship with her father—which was the subject of the Mail on Sunday story—started to go awry “when the media got involved.” She also said Queen Elizabeth II and King Charles III, then the Prince of Wales, had advised her to write the now-infamous letter to her father describing her heartache caused by his “lying” and exploitation of her relationship with Harry in interviews.
Meghan even suggested that the letter had been intercepted on the way to her father after she saw the handwriting used to sign for the letter’s delivery. “It’s not his signature,” Meghan said in the show. “I know my dad’s handwriting. That’s not my dad’s handwriting. It just says ‘Thomas.’”
Meghan says she was tightly controlled by the Palace. “We were in this bubble where everything is controlled by them. I couldn’t even text my friends a photo… You do as you’re told.”
Meghan also discusses how she contemplated suicide, saying she thought, “All of this will stop if I’m not here.” She added, “That was the scariest thing about it. It was such clear thinking.”
Meghan’s mother, Doria, also appears to blame the media for Meghan’s suicidal anguish, saying she was being constantly “picked at” by “vultures.”
Harry said, “I felt angry and ashamed. I didn’t deal with it particularly well. I dealt with it as institutional Harry as opposed to husband Harry. And what took over my feelings was my royal role. I had been trained to worry more about, ‘What are people going to think if we don’t go to this event? We’re going to be late.’ Looking back, I hate myself for it. What she needed from me was so much more than I was able to give.”
Meghan said: “I wanted to go somewhere to get help. But I wasn’t allowed to. They were concerned about how that would look for the institution.”
Harry adds: “They knew how bad it was. They thought, ‘Why couldn’t she just deal with it?’ As if to say, ‘Well, everyone else has dealt with it, why can’t she deal with it?’ But this was different. It was really different. But even if you strip all that away and say, ‘Ok fine, it was exactly the same.’ So do we still believe she should have just sucked it up like other members of the family? Or does one think it’s about time that we stop. But no-one would have private conversations with the editors saying, ‘Enough.’
“My dad said to me, ‘Darling boy, you can’t take on the media. The media will always be the media.’ And I said, ‘I fundamentally disagree.’”
Harry then adds: “I have 30 years experience of looking behind the curtains and seeing how this system works and how it runs. Just, constant briefings about other members of the family, about favors, inviting the press in. It’s a dirty game.”
Viewers also get insight into the famous “five friends” who spoke to People magazine, allegedly without Meghan’s knowledge. This became a big issue in her privacy trial against the Mail where she denied encouraging the friends to curate her reputation. Abigail Spencer, a friend of Meghan’s, says she called “one of my closest friends who just so happened at the time to be the editor of People magazine,” to put together the story. The documentary does not ask Meghan if she knew anything about the story.
The opening minutes of Episode 4 focused on the couple’s wedding day in 2018. Meghan said: “Harry’s dad is very charming and I said to him, ‘I’ve lost my dad in this.’ So him as my father-in-law was very important to me. So I asked him to walk me down the aisle and he said yes.”
Harry also paid tribute to his father when discussing their decision to have a gospel choir. He said there was little resistance to the idea, and, having earlier said his father had helped him with music choices, added, of the gospel choir, “Again, more help from my dad on that one.”
The first episode then follows the couple’s tour of Australia and New Zealand, when Meghan announced she was pregnant. A friend named Abigail Spencer says, “The work they were doing, the speeches, the people they were meeting, it seemed to be amazing. And then—I don’t understand what happened after that.” Another friend, Lucy Fraser, a PR executive, says: “I think Australia was a real turning point because they were so popular with the public, that internals at the palace were incredibly threatened by that.”
Fraser’s point is offered without evidence, however a headline from The Daily Beast reading, “Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are Wildly Popular. That Could Be a Problem,” flashes up on the screen. The Daily Beast can confirm that the tour did raise questions about how well William would cope if Harry continued to overshadow him, however it also said: “No one will be more delighted [the tour] is going so well than Kate and William.”
Piers Morgan, who would later become an arch-critic, is heard saying Meghan is “a royal rock star, bigger as a couple than William and Kate. That’s probably not a good thing in the long term.” Harry said that their popularity and “stealing” of “the limelight” and that they were “doing the job better than the person who was born to do this”—presumably William—“that upsets people because it shifts the balance.”
The final episode opens with Harry joyfully declaring in a selfie video: “We are on the freedom flight!” The plane was traveling from Canada to Los Angeles in March 2020 following the couple’s defining split with the royal family. The new episodes also cover how Meghan and Harry explored options to move to Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa before settling on California.
