In their new Netflix documentary, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are setting the record straight on a whole bunch of tabloid rumours that were reported about them over the years since their romance was made public. Six years and a senior departure from the royal family later, there’s a lot to go through – and not all of them likely fit into the six-part series.
‘We were playing whack-a-mole every day, the stories were constant,’ Meghan said of the tabloid frenzy around her wedding. ‘They were going through the woodwork and pulling out people to create and plant the most salacious stories that they could.’
Having done a deep dive into all three episodes of the documentary, we’ve taken a shot at collecting all of the mistruths reported that Meghan and Harry discuss for your reading pleasure…
‘They met on a blind date set up by a mutual friend’
The first bombshell dropped in the series is that Harry and Meghan actually knew each other on Instagram before their fateful Soho House date. Harry reveals that he found Meghan through a mutual friend on the app, in a picture wearing a Snapchat dog filter no less and enquired about her with said friend. Some cupid work later, the friend encouraged Meghan to go on a date with him, and she had fully stalked his Instagram prior to their first meet.
‘Meghan knew all about the royal family before joining’
This was a big stick in the mud for a lot of tabloids, claiming that Meghan was obsessed with royal life and framing her relationship with Harry as some kind of master manipulation to become a princess. Meghan always denied being well-versed on the British royal family’s shenanigans, saying she had never Googled him before meeting. What she did clear up though in the documentary is that she never needed to Google him, because she had his secret Instagram to stalk!
‘Harry’s hell-raising teen years were full of drink, drugs, and girls’
Harry’s days at Eton are well documented, often described by tabloids as a hellraising drunken mess who was already on drugs and at nightclubs with different girls. ‘Not all of the stories were made up,’ Harry admits. ‘But they were exaggerated.’
‘Samantha Markle and Meghan were close sisters until their fall-out’
The documentary goes deep into the Samantha Markle debacle, which saw Thomas Markle’s eldest daughter throw numerous shots at Meghan in tabloid interviews ahead of her 2018 wedding. But according to Meghan, the pair barely knew each other.
‘My half-sister who I hadn’t seen for over a decade and that was only for a day and a half, suddenly it felt like she was everywhere,’ Meghan says of the lead up to the wedding. ‘I don’t know your middle name, I don’t know your birthday, you’re telling these people that you raised me, and you’ve coined me Princess Pushy?
‘I don’t remember seeing her when I was a kid at my dad’s house, if and when they would come around,’ Meghan continued. ‘The last time I saw her that I remember was in my early 20s. I hadn’t had a fall-out with her, we didn’t have a closeness to be able to have that – and I wanted a sister.’
Doria agrees, saying ‘Tom’s kids were a good 17 years older than her, and Meg and I left when she was two!’. In a statement to Netflix, Samantha maintains that she had a close relationship with Meghan until 2018 and says the media fabricated quotes that were attributed to her.
Samantha’s tabloid talking ultimately got in the way of Meghan’s relationship with Samantha’s biological daughter Ashleigh – who was raised by her paternal grandparents from the age of two and was estranged from her mother until 2007 – after the pair had formed a close bond over the years. In fact, Harry and Meghan’s comms team advised Meghan not to invite Ashleigh to the wedding.
‘How do we explain that this half-sister isn’t invited to the wedding, but that half-sister’s daughter is?’ Meghan said. ‘And so, with Ashleigh, the guidance at the time was to not have her come to our wedding… that was painful.’
‘Communication with Meg became less and less frequent, my impression was that her relationships were being managed on some level,’ Ashleigh shared. ‘I think I said [about not being invited to the wedding] I was hurt on some level, but I understood where it was coming from. To know that it’s because of my biological mother that this relationship that’s so important to me was impacted in that way, to feel like because of her it was taken away, has been hard.’
‘Meghan shut Thomas Markle out of her life’
One of the biggest scoops revealed in the documentary is what really went on behind the scenes in the run up to the wedding when Meghan’s father Thomas was pictured in the press preparing for the big day, after a sea of stories about their supposed ruptured relationship and accusations Meghan had not made enough effort to include her father in her new life.
It’s known that Thomas was accused of taking money to stage paparazzi pictures, but Meghan details the phone call she made to her father. Asking if he had staged the pictures, Thomas apparently denies the accusation.
‘I said to him, “Look, if they can’t stop this story then it’s going to come out tomorrow so why don’t we send someone to your house right now to get you out of there because if that’s the case then your house will be swarmed by media. We’ll get you out,’ Meghan recalls. He rejected her offer, saying he had ‘things he needed to do’.
‘It felt really cagey,’ Meghan said in the documentary. ‘When we hung up, I looked at Harry and said, “I don’t know why but I don’t believe him”. The unravelling happened that week when he wouldn’t pick up my calls but instead, you’re talking to TMZ. And I’m finding out that you’re not coming to our wedding through a tabloid.’