Meghan Markle Said She Was Bullied the Most While Pregnant with Archie and Lili

"It’s not catty, it’s cruel."

As a public figure often on the receiving end of British tabloid fodder and social media hate, Meghan Markle is deeply familiar with online bullying. While appearing on a panel at the SXSW film festival on Friday, March 8, the Duchess of Sussex got candid about the exact time she received the most vitriolic feedback from the public: when she was pregnant with her and Prince Harry's kids, Archie and Lilibet.

“It’s really interesting as I can reflect on it—I keep my distance from it right now just for my own wellbeing—but the bulk of the bullying and abuse that I was experiencing on social media and online was when I was pregnant with Archie and Lili, and with a newborn with each of them," she explained, per People, to moderator Errin Haines during the Opening Day Keynote Panel alongside Katie Couric, Brooke Shields, and Nancy Wang Yuen.

For the event, Markle looked sophisticated in an ivory pinstriped silk button-up maxi dress, which she accessorized with gold hoop earrings and white slip-on pointed-toe heels. Markle continued, saying she cannot understand why someone would target an expecting or new mom during that "sacred time."

“You just think about that, and to really wrap your head around why people would be so hateful," she said. "It’s not catty, it’s cruel. And why you would do that, certainly, when you’re pregnant, with a newborn, we all know as moms, it’s such a tender and sacred time."

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Markle—who has previously spoken about the mental health struggles she faced during her first pregnancy with her and Prince Harry's son—added that, in a way, Archie protected her at her lowest points.

"I think, you know, you could either succumb to it, nearly succumb to how painful that it is, and maybe in some regards, because I was pregnant, that mammalian instinct just kicked in, you do everything you can to protect your child, and as a result, protect yourself too,” she said.

Elsewhere during the conversation, she stated that so "much of the hate is women completely spewing it to other women," which she finds "disturbing."

“I cannot make sense of that, because I understand that there are certain platforms; today is a really good example, this is being streamed on one of those platforms, and it’s also fantastic because people are going to have access to hear all of this brilliance and all of this insight," she said. "And at the same time, it’s a platform that has quite a bit of hate and rhetoric and incentivizes people to create pages where they can churn out very, very inciting comments and conspiracy theories that can have a tremendously negative effect on someone’s mental health, on their physical safety."

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