If you or a loved one are struggling with suicidal thoughts, please reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. You can also text or dial 988.
In his memoir, Spare, Prince Harry writes movingly about the moment his wife Meghan Markle told him in January 2019 that she was contemplating suicide. She had been cast as a “witch” by the media, he writes. If her bra strap was showing she was “clueless,” if she repeat-wore a dress she was “trashy,” if her fingernails were black she was a “Goth,” if she had problems with curtseying it was because she was American, if she shut her own car door she was “uppity.”
With such criticism at fever pitch, Meghan told Harry she did not want to live “anymore… It’s all so painful. To be hated like this—for what?”
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“What had she done,” Harry said Meghan asked. “What sin had she committed to deserve this kind of treatment?”
“She just wanted the pain to stop,” she said. “Not only for her, for everyone. For me, for her mother. But she couldn’t make it stop, so she’d decided to disappear… Without her, she said, the press would go away, and I wouldn’t have to live like this. Our unborn child would never have to live like this.”
“It’s so clear,” Meghan kept saying, Harry writes. “Just stop breathing. Stop being. This exists because I exist.”
In the moment, Harry “asked her to be strong, hang on,” but “like a fucking royal” he was also concerned about being late for an engagement they were due to attend that night, and which Harry was sure Meghan would be blamed if they did not attend.
He suggested Meghan skip it, but “she didn’t trust herself to be at home alone for even an hour with such dark feelings.” They went to that engagement at London’s Royal Albert Hall in aid of Harry’s Sentebale charity, where Harry said Meghan wept silently, and he whispered to her: “Trust me, I’ll keep you safe.”
