LONDON (Reuters) – Netflix released the final three episodes of a documentary series from Britain’s Prince Harry and his wife Meghan on Thursday, setting out their battles with the media and why they stepped down as working members of Britain’s royal family.
Below are quotes from the series:
HARRY ON MEGHAN’S MISCARRIAGE
“I believe my wife suffered a miscarriage because of what the Mail did,” he said, referring to the British tabloid newspaper. “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 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.”
HARRY ON HIS RELATIONS WITH HIS FAMILY
“It was hard. Especially spending time having chats with my brother and my father who just were very much focused on the same misinterpretation of the whole situation. So none of us really wanted to have to talk about it at my grandfather’s funeral. But we did.
“And I’ve had to make peace with the fact that we’re probably never going to get genuine accountability or genuine apology. My wife and I were we’re moving on. We’re focused on the on what’s coming next.”
HARRY ON RIFT WITH HIS BROTHER WILLIAM
“William and I both saw what happened in our in our dad’s office and we made an agreement we would never let that happen to our office.
“I would far rather get destroyed in the press than play along with this game, or this business of trading. To see my brother’s office copy the very same thing that we promised the two of us would never ever do, that was heartbreaking.”
HARRY ON THE MISSED OPPORTUNITY BY THE ROYALS
“Anyone inside that system, whether it’s my family, whether it’s staff, whether it’s PR, whoever it is, has missed an enormous opportunity with my wife and how far that would go globally.”
MEGHAN ON ROYALS AND THE MEDIA
“You would just see it play out. Like a story about someone in the family would pop up for a minute and they would go: got to make that go away.
“But there is a real estate on a website home page, on a newspaper front cover, and something has to be filled in there about someone royal.”
HARRY ON LACK OF SUPPORT FOR SOMEONE NEW IN THE FAMILY
“The issue is when someone who’s marrying in, and should be a supporting act, is then stealing the limelight or doing the job better than the person who was born to do this, that upsets people, it shifts the balance.”
MEGHAN ON LEAVING THE FAMILY
“We landed in Canada and one of the security guards who had been with H for so long, and these guys were so wonderful, I just collapsed in his arms crying. I was like ‘I tried so hard.’ He goes ‘I know you did, I know you did, ma’am, I know you did.”
HARRY ON HIS FAMILY
“I felt really distant from the rest of my family, which was interesting because so much of how they operate is about what it looks like rather than what it feels like. And it looked cold, but it also felt cold.”
HARRY ON LEAVING THE ROYAL FAMILY
“This was years in the making. We wanted to remove the supposed public interest that the press had over every element of our lives. Their argument was if you have even 1% public funding of any part of your life then we can basically claim public interest and we can invade your privacy on everything.
“In 2018, we had already talked about perhaps moving to New Zealand and that never transpired. Then the beginning of 2019, we discussed the whole concept of us moving to South Africa and us supporting charities and organisations in Africa.
“The palace signed off on us moving to South Africa. My father’s office knew about it, my brother’s office knew about it, and my grandmother’s office knew about it. No one else knew. It was very much an internal document. No one else knew.
“And it was leaked to The Times newspaper and then that whole plan was scrapped because it became a public debate. Once plans like that become public debates 9 times out of 10 it is going to fail.”
(Reporting by UK bureau; Editing by Alex Richardson)
