Meghan Markle says she's been told people “rejoiced in the streets” when she married Prince Harry, just like when Nelson Mandela was freed from prison.
The Duchess of Sussex has recalled an interaction during a premiere of The Lion King in London back in 2019, saying one well-wisher told her that her marriage was celebrated as much as the freeing of Mandela.
In an interview with The Cut magazine, she said: “I just had Archie. It was such a cruel chapter. I was scared to go out.”
She then remembered how a cast member from South Africa pulled her aside.
“He looked at me, and he’s just like light," she said.
"He said, ‘I just need you to know: When you married into this family, we rejoiced in the streets the same we did when Mandela was freed from prison.’”
The revelations came in her latest bombshell interview where she spoke openly about the couple’s decision to step back from royal duties in 2020 and said they were “happy” to leave the UK.
During the interview, Meghan said: "Harry said to me, ‘I lost my dad in this process.’ It doesn’t have to be the same for them as it was for me, but that’s his decision."
Prince Charles was reportedly hurt by the suggestions made in the recent interview about his closeness with Harry, with a source saying he would have been “saddened” if he lost his relationship with his son.
"The Prince of Wales loves both his sons," they said.
Meghan's allies have since tried to clarify and say the comments were in fact referring to her own father, Thomas Markle, whom she has not spoken to since the royal wedding in 2018.
Prince Charles stepped in at the last minute to walk Meghan down the aisle at her wedding to Harry at Windsor Castle.
But Harry's relationship with his father has been said to be tense since the couple's departure from being working royals.
In her latest interview Meghan, who is currently promoting her new podcast Archetypes, said the family's move to the US was necessary to secure financial freedom.
She defended the move by saying it was not “reinventing the wheel”, claiming a “handful of princes and princesses and dukes” already have the “very arrangement they wanted”. The mum-of-two did not name those she was referring to.
Discussing leaving the UK, Meghan told the magazine the couple was willing to go to another Commonwealth country and work on behalf of the Royal Family but wanted to make their own money.
“Then maybe all the noise would stop,” Meghan said of their reasoning.
“Anything to just … because just by existing, we were upsetting the dynamic of the hierarchy.
”So we go, ‘Okay, fine, let’s get out of here. Happy to,’ ” she then said, raising her hands in a sign of mock defeat.
