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Duchess of Sussex describes having a miscarriage, which Harry blames on ‘what the Mail did’
In the final episode of the Harry & Meghan Netflix documentary, the Duchess of Sussex speaks of having a miscarriage while living in the US after the birth of the couple’s first child, which Prince Harry says he blames on the actions of Associated Newspapers – publisher of the Mail On Sunday and Mail Online. The couple were engaged in legal action over the paper reproducing in February 2019 a letter that Meghan had sent to her estranged father, Thomas Markle.
Harry says: “I believe my wife suffered a miscarriage because of what the Mail did. I watched the whole thing. Now, do we absolutely know that the miscarriage was caused by that? Of course we don’t.
“But bearing in mind the stress that caused, the lack of sleep and the timing of the pregnancy – how many weeks in she was – I can say from what I saw, that miscarriage was created by what they were trying to do to her.”
Meghan’s friend, Abigail Spencer, describes watching the duchess fall to the floor while she was holding her son, Archie, in her new home, having said “I’m having a lot of pain”.
Meghan’s lawyer, Jenny Afia, says in the documentary that the case was taking a huge toll on Meghan. Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, said “I thought she was brave and courageous. But that doesn’t surprise me because she is brave and courageous.”
The duchess goes on to say in the programme: “When I reveal things that are moments of vulnerability, when it comes to having a miscarriage and maybe having felt ashamed about that, like, it’s OK, you’re human, it’s OK to talk about that.
“And I could make the choice to never talk about those things, or I could make the choice to say with all the bad that comes with this, the good is being able to help other people. That’s the point of life, right, is connection and community like that.”
Meghan wrote a piece – The losses we share – in November 2020 for the New York Times about miscarriage, saying:
Losing a child means carrying an almost unbearable grief, experienced by many but talked about by few. In the pain of our loss, my husband and I discovered that in a room of 100 women, 10 to 20 of them will have suffered from miscarriage. Yet despite the staggering commonality of this pain, the conversation remains taboo, riddled with (unwarranted) shame, and perpetuating a cycle of solitary mourning.
Key events
So what did I make of it? Well, as I’ve mentioned, I personally feel like everything Harry has done seems to come off as being driven by the experiences of his childhood with the media coverage of his mum, and he’s essentially sought to change his whole life to avoid his children having the same experience.
I think it is perfectly possible to believe that there was negative briefing about the couple, that racism is a factor in the way that Meghan was covered by the press in the UK, and also that the couple can come off as annoyingly self-centred and a bit tone deaf at times. As an informative work, the documentary would definitely have benefited from anybody putting a bit of context into it from a more neutral viewpoint than the “this is our story, our way” path it took, but I guess for the couple that was the whole point.
The industrial-level production of negative stories about the documentary and the vociferous refusal in some quarters to accept that racism framed some of the coverage in the media tells its own story.
Anyway, thank you for joining me and reading along. I’m going write a summary post of the key points made in today’s three episodes, and then I’m going to go and do something else.
The bit I am not skipping forward is the captions that have gone up with legal disclaimers about the comments made in the documentary about Jason Knauf [see 12.58am GMT]. I will repeat them in full here. They read:
In response to allegations that Mr Knauf submitted a voluntary witness statement in connection with the Daily Mail litigation with the consent of Prince William’s office, a representative for Mr Knauf sent the following statement:
These claims are entirely false. Mr Knauf was asked to provide evidence by both the Duchess of Sussex and Associated Newspapers.
He was advised by counsel that evidence in his possession could be relevant and he then provided this directly to the courts, staying neutral in the process.
The Duchess of Sussex attorneys responded with the following statement:
The legal team for Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, disputes this claim. Mr Knauf was not asked to provide a witness statement by The Duchess or her tea.
Nor do her attorneys believe Mr Knauf remained “neutral” y submitting a witness statement relied on by Associated Newspapers whilst working fo the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.
The documentary appears to be coming to a close with Meghan reading a fairytale-esque version of their story off a phone while we get lots of archive clips. I must confess I’ve skipped forward through this bit.
“We are exactly where we are supposed to be,” says Harry. I assume he means in California, not on Netflix.
I think we are on the last stretch now. There’s some upbeat music vibes, Follow the Sun by Xavier Rudd, and lots of shots of the family playing and vistas of their new life in California. Although there are still nine minutes to go so who knows?
Harry says he misses “the weird family gatherings” and he misses the UK and friends, and notes “I’ve lost a few friends in this process as well.”
“I came here because I’ve changed. I’d outgrown my environment,” he says, and mentions that California was probably one of the places his mother would have ended up living.
There’s more yoga and meditation now as Meghan is saying she just wants to be at peace with herself. The editing on this documentary does have some genuinely odd jarring moments.
Meghan’s niece, Ashleigh, is back. You may – or may not – recall from last week that her and Meghan fell out after the palace stopped Ashleigh from coming to the wedding because Ashleigh’s maternal mother was Samantha Markle who had been talking a lot to the newspapers about Meghan.
We are back to the court case with the Mail now, and I’m going to tread lightly here as they are discussing Jason Knauf. For clarity he is frequently correctly described as being a former aide to the Sussexes, but he is also a former aide to Prince William and is on the board of the Earthshot Prize, which William is involved in. There has been some disagreement over the years over who said what to who and when. Knauf’s witness statement became an important factor in the court case.
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One of the frustrations of this documentary as anything approaching a journalism project is that the people speaking are all from Meghan and Harry’s team, and there is no interrogative interview at any point. Former palace spokesperson James Holt is involved with the Archewell Foundation that has been promoted during the episodes. We hear from Meghan’s lawyer, but not from any other legal expert about the case, and so forth.
There’s a US news interview clip now where Meghan is saying that she was doing the court case to “stand up for what’s right”.
Harry says: “As has been proven time and time again, there’s an incentive for the British media to get you to trial, because they can make so much money, and create such a circus around it, which is exactly what they did here.”
I must interject personally at this point to say that is almost entirely the opposite of everything I’ve ever been taught about media law, responsible reporting and not landing my employers with massive court costs, but I have not worked in every newsroom and so I cannot speak for the prevailing culture everywhere.
There’s a moment now that I think gets to the heart of it. As I’ve mentioned before, I just feel like the main thing that came across in the first three episodes was that Harry grew up with a deeply damaging experience of the media intrusion on his mother. After some more clips of the kids, he says:
Just seeing Archie running across the lawn and a big smile, this is the world that he knows. He spent his first five months in Windsor, that was it. This is home to him. This is home to Lili. And this is our home.
I can’t help feeling that the entire premise of the decisions Harry and Meghan have made is driven by his desire to avoid his children having the same childhood that he did.
Other media will no doubt criticise the couple for talking about privacy while also publishing loads of clips of their kids on Netflix, but the difference here surely is that Archie and Lilibet are being seen in home movies filmed in the same sorts of circumstances that parents the world over film their kids using their phones. It is a world apart from that grim footage of the royal children being assembled on parade at a ski resort in the 1990s, or Diana being chased through an airport trying to hide her face with a tennis racket.
“I think at the moment I see a lot of my wife in Archie and a lot of my mum in Lili,” Harry says. “She’s very Spencer-like”. There are a lot of home movies now, and Serena Williams reappears to say: “Friends can be family too.”
There are then some clips of the couple’s second child, introduced as Lilibet Diana, at a very young age, resting on Meghan.
In the Netflix documentary, the Duke of Sussex said returning for the funeral of his grandfather, Prince Philip was hard because of the attitude of his brother and father towards him.
“It was hard. Especially spending a time having chats with my brother and father who were just, you know, very much focused on the same misinterpretation of the whole situation. None of us really wanted to have to talk about it at my grandfather’s funeral, but we did.”
“I’ve had to make peace with the fact that I’m probably never going to get genuine accountability or a genuine apology. You know, my wife and I, we’re moving on.”
In a reference to Harry’s mother’s funeral, one of Harry’s friends says that “to be walking behind the coffin again must have brought up some other stuff as well,” as we see Charles, William and Harry among the entourage accompanying Philip’s cortege. Prince Andrew is also briefly in shot.
We have now fast-forwarded to the death of Prince Philip, and Harry is showing footage on his phone of black cabs paying their respects outside Buckingham Palace. Harry is clearly quite moved by it.
“My grandfather was a man of service, honour and great humour,” says Harry, after we’ve seen a segment of a heavily pregnant Meghan discussing with Harry how he can get back to the UK for the funeral.
We then see the moment that Harry has apparently received a text from his brother. “I wish I knew what to do,” says Harry, in a clip that I suspect is going to be widely criticised for showing a clearly very personal moment in this story that was also conveniently being filmed for the ensuing documentary.
“I know,” Meghan tells Harry. “Let’s take a breather. Get some air and then decide.”
Meghan is now reading out the royal family statement that was made after the interview, which was issued by the late Queen Elizabeth II:
The whole family is saddened to learn the full extent of how challenging the last few years have been for Harry and Meghan. The issues raised, particularly that of race, are concerning. While some recollections may vary, they are taken very seriously and will be addressed by the family privately. Harry, Meghan and Archie will always be much-loved family members.
We’ve cut back to the row about racism in the aftermath of the Oprah interview, with a clip of William being asked if the royal family is racist. “I haven’t spoken to him but I will do,” says William of his brother. “We are very much not a racist family.”
I’ve just reached a bit in the documentary where Meghan has said “Beyoncé just texted” and Harry’s face at that precise moment is potentially going to be a meme for the ages.
Meghan says that she thought the biggest takeaway from the interview would be about her talking about her depression and how deep it got, but “it was entirely eclipsed by the conversation about race,” she says.
