Harry & Meghan's Netflix docuseries: The good, the bad and the ugly
😃 The Good: Viewers get insight into Harry and Meghan's love story
😔 The Bad: Why Meghan's relationship with her family ended
😥 The Ugly: Meghan and Harry open up about racist attacks
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle shocked many people when they revealed they would be releasing a tell-all six-part documentary about their relationship, with the pair making several surprising claims during the first three episodes following their release this week.
The three episodes reveal never-before-seen photos and videos as Harry and Meghan share insight into why they stepped down as senior members of the royal family in 2020.
Harry and Meghan spill on their love story
Harry and Meghan surprised viewers by revealing they actually 'met' through Instagram, with the Duke of Sussex sharing that he first saw Meghan in a goofy video shared by a mutual friend.
"Who is that?" he recalled asking himself at the time. The friend connected the two and from then on, they "were constantly in touch".
Speaking of their first date, Meghan revealed Harry was 30 minutes late, however, this didn't stop them from instantly getting along. Meghan reveals they "were childlike together".
After a couple of dates, they were once again separated as Meghan returned to Canada to work on Suits, but they both happened to have one week off at the same time, with Harry inviting Meghan to Botswana with him. The pair stayed in a tent together and fell in love during that week.
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In October 2016, Harry was informed that the press was going to out their romance, with the pair deciding they had to have one fun night before their secret romance wasn't so secret anymore. Harry and Meghan, along with Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank, enjoyed a final night of freedom at a Halloween party before the news broke the following day.
The pair also shared how Harry proposed to Meghan in November 2017 in the North Garden in Kensington Palace on a picnic blanket that was lit with 15 electric candles, with Meghan's dog Guy in attendance. They announced the engagement a few weeks later when their lives changed forever.
"This is a great love story. And the craziest thing is that I think this love story is only just getting started," Harry said of their relationship. "She sacrificed everything that she ever knew, the freedom that she had, to join me in my world, and then pretty soon after that I end up sacrificing everything that I know to join her in her world."
MORE GOOD:
Meghan reveals how her relationship with her father and family ended
In the third episode of the docuseries, Meghan speaks about her complicated relationship with her father Thomas Markle and his side of the family, which became incredibly strained in the lead-up to her wedding to Harry.
Meghan shares that while she isn't close with her half-sister Samantha Markle, she became close to her niece Ashleigh Hale, who was raised by her paternal grandparents, as adults. While Meghan wanted to invite Ashleigh to the royal wedding, when Samantha began talking to the press about her own relationship with Meghan the pair had to make the very difficult decision to disinvite Ashleigh.
However, she also revealed her father was always invited to the wedding, and she actually learned he wouldn't be attending after seeing it online on TMZ. She shared that she tried to call him repeatedly to clear the air, but he only communicated via text, including a message that seemed suspicious to her because he used her full name, 'Meghan', when he normally calls her Meg.
"I was like, that’s not my dad," she says. "We knew that his phone had been compromised."
“Of course, it’s incredibly sad what happened,” says Harry. “She had a father before this, and now she doesn’t have a father. And I shouldered that, because if Meg wasn’t with me, then her dad would still be her dad.”
MORE BAD:
Meghan and Harry accuse media of 'destroying' them with racist attacks
Prince Harry shared that the royal family questioned why Meghan should be "protected" following countless racist headlines and stalking by paparazzi when the news of their relationship first broke.
Harry shared that the advice he received from the palace was, "Don't say anything."
"So, it was almost like a rite of passage, and some of the members of the royal family were like: 'My wife had to go through that, so why should your girlfriend be treated any differently? Why should you get special treatment? Why should she be protected?'" he said.
"I said: 'The difference here is the race element.'"
Headlines from newspapers and websites flashed on screen, including an infamous Daily Mail headline that read: "Harry’s girl is (almost) straight outta Compton."
Meghan responded to the headline, saying, "Firstly, I’m not from Compton, I’ve never lived in Compton, so it’s factually incorrect. But why do you have to make a dig at Compton?"
Her mother Doria Ragland added, "They would take pictures of different parts of, say, Skid Row, and say that is where I lived and that is where she was from."
"It was horrible," Meghan said. "But I continued to hold the line. Say nothing."
Harry added, "My son, my daughter, my children are mixed race, and I’m really proud of that. When my kids grow up, and they look back at this moment, and they turn to me and say, ‘What did you do in this moment?’, I want to be able to give them an answer."
He also called out the Windsors' "unconscious bias" as images of Princess Michael of Kent wearing a blackamoor-style brooch to a Christmas lunch attended by Meghan in 2017 emerged, which she later apologised for. "In this family, sometimes you are part of the problem rather than part of the solution. There is a huge level of unconscious bias," Harry said.
Meghan shared that she hoped the media coverage might improve after the wedding, saying, "But truth be told, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how good I was, no matter what I did, they were still going to find a way to destroy me."
MORE UGLY:
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