When asked to describe his experience in returning to Britain for the funeral of Prince Philip in April 2021, after the broadcast of his landmark interview with Oprah Winfrey, the prince said:
“It was hard. Especially spending time, having chats with my brother and my father who just were very much focused on the same misinterpretation of the whole situation.”
“None of us really wanted to talk have to about it at my grandfather’s funeral, but we did.”
On the takeaways from those discussions with Prince William and the then-Prince Charles, Harry said: “You know, I’ve had to make peace with the fact that we’re probably not gonna get genuine accountability or a genuine apology. You know, my wife and I, we’re moving on. We’re focused on what’s coming next. "
In the context of a discussion about his relationship with William, who he described as having screamed and shouted at him during their January 2020 “Sandringham summit” discussions about the Sussexes stepping away from royal life, Harry discussed a story that had broken the same day accusing William of bullying.
“That day a story came out, saying that part of the reason why Meghan and I were leaving was because William had bullied us out,” he said in the fifth episode of Harry & Meghan.
“Once I got in the car after the meeting, I was a told about a joint statement that had been put out in my name and my brother’s name squashing the story about him bullying us out of the family.”
“I couldn’t believe it. No one had asked me permission to put my name to a statement like that. And I rang M [Meghan] and I told her, and she burst into floods of tears. Because within four hours, they were happy to lie to protect my brother and yet for three years they were never willing to tell the truth to protect us.”
The relationship between William and Harry has been closely watched over the past five years as speculative stories of a royal rift began to circulate about the pair.
In 2021, Harry told Oprah Winfrey he loved his brother “to bits,” but admitted the relationship was one of “space at the moment.”
The brothers reunited in September 2022 to attend the ceremonial tributes following the death of Queen Elizabeth II.
The full story can be found here.
The Duchess faced criticism in the press and online at the time of the shower over speculative reports detailing its alleged cost and extravagance.
“My girlfriends surprised me with a really beautiful baby shower in New York,” Meghan said in episode four of Harry & Meghan. “They’re like, ‘We’re gonna shower her with love and shower her baby and she’s gonna survive this and we’re gonna get through it with her.’”
Describing the small party, pro tennis player and close friend of Meghan’s Serena Williams said: “It was just so cool and so fun to just like try to have an intimate moment. I don’t think I understood that there was no intimate moment that one could have.”
While in New York, Meghan was met with banks of paparazzi outside her hotel as were the party guests which included among them Amal Clooney and Gayle King.
Of the media criticism that followed the shower, Meghan said: “It was so wrong. These independent strong successful women chose to use their own money and it’s not taxpayer money to throw a party for their friend from a place of love. Why are you taking such a beautiful moment and trying to ruin it?”
Now, Meghan and Harry accuse William of authorizing the leak. The leak led to Meghan having to apologize for misleading the court.
The full story is here.
“There’s all this untruth,” Abigail Spencer says in the series. “There’s all these lies, and it just seemed to be getting worse.”
Spencer, who co-starred with Meghan in Suits, reveals that she approached the editor of People magazine with an eye toward speaking out anonymously about her friend.
“I called one of my closest friends who just so happened at the time to be the editor of People magazine,” she says. “I said, we have to turn this narrative around. You know, it will just be her closest friends coming together to talk about the person she really is in the middle of this [chaos].”
Silver Tree, a producer from Suits, adds, “It was born out of just wanting to remind the world that she’s a person and not a headline and that she is loved, and stick up for her.”
After the story came out, “there was a little bit of an exhale,” Spencer says.
The story would become controversial later on as it was central to one stage of Meghan’s legal battle against the Mail on Sunday. Meghan won the right to keep her friends’ names private. This series reveals that Spencer had the idea for the piece and Tree supported the plan, but does not go into the identities of each of the friends quoted in the story.
“I believe my wife suffered a miscarriage because of what the Mail on Sunday did. I watched the whole thing,” Harry said. He attributed this to the lack of sleep and stress of dealing with the suit. The couple have since welcomed their second daughter, Lilibet Diana Mountbatten-Windsor, in June 2021.
The full story can be found here.
“I remember her telling me that, that she had wanted to take her own life,” Ragland says. “And um… and that really broke my heart. Because I knew… Well, I knew that it was bad. But to just constantly be, um, picked at by these vultures. Just picking away at her spirit. That she would actually think of not wanting to be here…”
Ragland continues: “That, uh… It’s… that’s not an easy one for a mom to hear. … And I can’t protect her. H can’t protect her.”
Harry speaks about his own reaction to the knowledge that Meghan was having dark thoughts.
“I was devastated,” he says. “I knew that she was struggling and we were both struggling. But I never thought that it would get to that stage. And the fact that it got to that stage, I felt angry and ashamed.”
He concedes that, as previously revealed in the couple’s March 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, he now feels he could have done more to help his wife.
“I didn’t deal with it particularly well,” he says. “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 gonna think if we don’t go to this event? We’re gonna be late. And looking back on it now, I… I hate myself for it. What she needed from me was so much more than I was able to give.”
Meghan repeats another assertion made in the interview with Winfrey: that she wanted to seek help but it was forbidden.
“I wanted to go somewhere to get help, but I wasn’t allowed to,” she says. “They were concerned about how that would look for the institution.”
Harry expresses his frustration with the idea that nothing could be done about her media treatment. Even if her treatment had been exactly as bad as that of other family members, he says, “Do we still believe that she should’ve just sucked it up like other members of the family? Or does one think that maybe it’s about time that we stopped?”
He continues, “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.’”
The Commonwealth Day service held at Westminster Abbey was the finale of the couple’s last round of public engagements and a large number of royals including Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles, Camilla, Prince William and Kate Middleton were all in attendance.
“We were nervous seeing the family because all the TV cameras and everybody watching at home and everybody watching in the audience,” Harry says in the Netflix series. “It’s like living through a soap opera where everybody else views you as entertainment.”
He adds that the royal family sometimes focuses on appearances rather than emotions.
“I felt really distant from the rest of my family,” he says, “which was interesting because so much of how they operate is about what it looks like rather than what it feels like. And it looked cold. But it also felt cold.”
Reports at the the time of the service focused on Harry and Meghan’s lack of interaction with the royals, most notably William and Kate. Following the service, Meghan flew to Canada where the couple were living before they made their eventual move to the U.S. shortly after.
Meghan says she didn’t have a “seat at the table” at the meeting that was being held to discuss her and Harry’s future as the family deliberately planned it when she was not around Harry accuses his brother William of “scream[ing]” and “shout[ing],” his father of lying, and his grandmother of sitting silently the whole time This is the first time the public is being granted a firsthand account of what happened at the meeting, which has long been written about
The full story of what Harry and Meghan revealed can be found here.
“I had still been under the delusion that if it was in a tabloid, no one believed it,” she says. “Like, it’s a tabloid. And then we had a walkabout in Liverpool and there was a group of women, and one of them said to me, ‘What you’re doing to your father’s not right.’”
By this time, Meghan’s father Thomas Markle had been speaking to the press and making television appearances in which he criticized his daughter. He would later create his own YouTube channel to speak about Meghan.
“It was the first time that I went, ‘Oh my God. People actually believe this stuff.’ And then my entire center was rocked to its core,” Meghan says.
Harry adds, “The lies, it’s one thing. You kind of get used to that when you live within this family. But what they were doing to her and the effect that it was having on her… Like, enough. Enough of the pain, enough of the, the suffering.”
“So popular with the public,” their friend Lucy Fraser says in the Netflix series. “The internals at the Palace were incredibly threatened by that.”
They play a voiceover of Piers Morgan, one of the couple’s biggest media foes, explaining that they seem to be “becoming bigger than William and Kate.”
“That’s not a good thing in the long term,” Morgan asserts.
Then, the couple recall the moment “the penny dropped”.
Meghan and Harry had spent the night in Buckingham Palace and woke up to a breakfast spread They had attended an event for Remembrance Day the night before Meghan made the front page of the Telegraph even though the Queen had been in attendance.
“I went, ‘oh my God,’” Meghan says. The full story can be found here.
Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand’s book Finding Freedom asserted that the couple did announce the pregnancy at the wedding, upsetting Eugenie. They do not confirm or deny this rumor in the Netflix documentary.
They do explain how three days later, on October 15, 2018, a public announcement was made. They announced the pregnancy as they began a tour of Australia and New Zealand.
“We announced we were pregnant when we were in Australia,” Meghan says.
“We had to,” Harry cuts in, “you were starting to show.”
Meghan adds that it was “a really rigorous tour to do, pregnant.”
In an earlier episode of Harry & Meghan, Meghan asserts that she was a “daddy’s girl” her whole life and was surprised by her father’s actions. She ended up writing a letter to her father that resulted in a snowball effect of continued bad press and eventually lawsuits for the couple.
Now, Meghan reveals that:
Queen Elizabeth II and King Charles III, then known as Prince Charles, advised her to write the letter The letter’s leak to Mail on Sunday proved “horrendous” for Meghan Meghan and Harry’s decision to sue Mail on Sunday for printing parts of the letter was questioned by palace lawyers, even as the family’s most senior members had advised Meghan to write the letter
Read all Meghan revealed on Netflix about the backstory behind the explosive letter here.
In episode four of their Netflix series, the couple imply that they didn’t live in as much grandeur as some would expect the newly minted Duke and Duchess of Sussex to enjoy.
“As far as people were concerned we were living in a palace, and we were in a cottage,” Harry says.
Meghan cuts in: “We were living on…”
And the two say in unison, “Palace grounds.”
From here, Meghan takes over. “Kensington Palace sounds very regal, of course it does,” she says. “It says palace in the name, but Nottingham Cottage was so small.”
“The whole thing’s on a slight lean,” Harry says. “Really low ceilings, I don’t know who it was ever for, [they] must have been very short.”
“He would just hit his head constantly in that place because he’s so tall,” Meghan says. “Me with a hoe and H varnishing. It was a chapter in our lives where I don’t think anyone could believe what was actually behind the scenes.”
Oprah Winfrey was also bemused by the couple’s quarters, Harry says. When the media mogul came over for tea, Harry said, “She goes, ’no one would ever believe it.’”
“No one would ever believe it,” Meghan reiterates.
The couple would later move to the larger Frogmore Cottage at Windsor Castle, which became a subject of controversy as the taxpayer footed a $3 million renovation bill which the couple was asked to pay back after they moved to North America.
“Harry’s dad is very charming and I said to him, like, I’ve lost my dad in this,” Meghan says. “So him as my father-in-law was really important to me. So I asked him to walk me down the aisle and he said yes.”
The couple also shared that Charles helped them secure the gospel choir that performed during the nuptials.
“There wasn’t too much pushback on that,” Harry said. “And again, more help from my dad on that.”
Meghan added: “He said they could take the best people from certain gospel choirs and put them together and that’s how Kingdom Choir came together, and they were great.”
Tennis great Serena Williams jumps in, saying: “To have her culture represented in that wedding. Amazing, I loved it. And I thought it was really courageous and breaking boundaries but not trying to.”
Of their following reception at St. George’s Hall, Harry and Meghan remarked about how they cut a cake with a sword and enjoyed a private performance by Elton John, which Meghan’s mom Doria Ragland was especially excited about.
“What she said to me was, it’s like this fish,” Meghan said. “It’s like swimming perfectly, powerful. It’s on the right current and one day this little organism comes in. This foreign organism and the entire thing goes, ‘What is that? What is it doing here? It doesn’t look like us, it doesn’t move like us. We don’t like it. Get it off of us.’”
Her words are cut with British television commentators opining that Meghan is “controlling” and demanding.
Meghan continues: “And she just explained, you know, that they’ll soon see that it’s stronger, faster, even better with this organism as part of it. It will be hard at the beginning for them to adjust to this new thing. But then it’ll be amazing.”
