Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s explosive new documentary, Harry & Meghan, is an intimate exposé revealing to the public their side of the salacious headlines that tormented the couple for years.
One headline in particular that the couple touched on was Meghan’s heartfelt personal essay in 2020 describing her miscarriage.
In November of 2020, Meghan penned a raw, first-person essay for the New York Times, detailed the “unbearable grief” she suffered following a miscarriage in July of that year.
Now, during the docuseries, the royal couple touch on what the loss of their second child meant to them, and the circumstances they were under which allegedly contributed in the Duchess of Sussex to miscarriage.
“I was pregnant, I really wasn’t sleeping and the first morning when we woke up in our new home [the couple’s Montecito mansion] I miscarried,” Meghan revealed.
“My wife suffered a miscarriage because of what The Mail did,” Prince Harry claimed.
As explained in the documentary, Prince Harry is referring to the landmark suit filed by the Duchess of Sussex against The Mail for publishing a confidential letter that she wrote to her father, Thomas Markle.
Meghan sued the publication for violating her privacy, citing that because the contents of the letter was personal in nature, the publishing of the letter was not of legitimate public interest.
“I watched the whole thing… do we absolutely know that the miscarriage was caused by that? Of course we don’t, but baring 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,” he added.
Toward the end of the second part, as we see Meghan take further litigation against the Mail she remarks “when I started this I had zero kids, and now I’ve had two and lost one and it’s still going”.
This explosive claim sparked a plethora of negative backlash for the royal couple.
“That’s a brave, extraordinary claim to blame a newspaper for a miscarriage, how do you prove that?” said royal commentator Richard Fitzwilliam.
“The Mail will have a lot to say about that and the Queen would be horrified at these wild claims. Where’s the introspection?” he added.
Another commentator, the royal editor of the Daily Mirror, also added that the bombshell was “extraordinary”.
“Saying that a newspaper is responsible for the death of an unborn child is an extraordinary allegation. There’s very little introspection here,” Russell Myers said on British morning television.
In Meghan’s 2020 essay, she described the experience of miscarriage as a “sharp cramp”, one she reveals happened while holding her 18-month-old son Archie Harrison.
“I dropped to the floor with him in my arms, humming a lullaby to keep us both calm, the cheerful tune a stark contrast to my sense that something was not right,” she wrote. “I knew, as I clutched my firstborn child, that I was losing my second.”
“Hours later, I lay in a hospital bed, holding my husband’s hand. I felt the clamminess of his palm and kissed his knuckles, wet from both our tears. Staring at the cold white walls, my eyes glazed over. I tried to imagine how we’d heal.”
Meghan added, “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.”
Meghan also referenced the now-famous moment between herself and journalist Tom Bradbury in the ITV documentary Harry & Meghan: An African Journey, who asked the mother if she was OK.
Reflecting on that moment, she wrote: “I recalled a moment last year when Harry and I were finishing up a long tour in South Africa. I was exhausted. I was breastfeeding our infant son, and I was trying to keep a brave face in the very public eye. ‘Are you OK?’ a journalist asked me.
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