Get all your news in one place.
100’s of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Entertainment
Katie Strick

Who’s who in Megflix? From Archie’s ex-nanny to Meghan’s BFF niece who wasn’t invited to their wedding

The friend Meghan texted before her first date with Prince Harry. The niece who couldn’t come to their wedding after their comms chief suggested it would look bad. The nanny who didn’t just look after Archie, but Meghan, too.

These are just some of the conveyor belt of talking heads and famous faces brought in front of the camera to speak in the Sussexes’ bombshell new Netflix documentary, the second volume of which came out today after three episodes were released last week.

Many of those faces were familiar ones, like close friends Serena Williams and Misan Harriman and Archewell aide James Holt. But others were less so: former security details, old school friends and even Meghan’s mother Doria Ragland – famously silent with the press until now – were among those who chose to come out and help the couple tell their so-called “truth”.

The three episodes released so far cover a wide range of subjects, from the beginning of Harry and Meghan’s love story (they met on Instagram! He was late to their first date! They went to Botswana having only met twice!) to racism in the UK.

From historian Afua Hirsch and her honest feelings on Harry, to actor Tyler Perry and why he decided to offer the Sussexes his home, here’s a who’s-who.

Lindsay Jill Roth

Role: Meghan’s university friend

Standout quote: “She wanted to just know him for him, not what the public thought he was”

(Netflix)

The American author and TV producer studied alongside Meghan at Northwestern University in Illinois. They both graduated in 2003 and and have been close friends for more than two decades – the two of them attended Wimbledon together with mutual friend Genevieve Hillis in 2019.

Roth is the first talking head to appear in the documentary, reminiscing about the summer of 2016 and how Meghan, then single and an old university friend, had a few different trips planned: “She was just going to be free”.

“I mean, she was giddy,” Roth says of the moment Meghan met Harry. “But I also know that she just really wanted to live in the moment. That she wanted to just know him for him, not what the public thought he was.”

Later, the mother-of-two talks about the leap of faith Meghan took in accepting Harry’s invitation to go to Botswana together after just two dates. “I think in her heart she just knew that she had to do that,” she recalls.

Lucy Fraser

Role: Meghan’s friend

Standout quote: “Everyone [at the engagement party] was dressed in animal onesies and Meg and Harry were in matching penguin onesies because penguins mate for life.”

Meghan’s British pal Lucy Fraser – a PR exec who was reportedly one of her closest friends to attend the royal wedding in 2018 – also harks back to that time, talking about the “single girl summer” travelling around Europe that Meghan had planned in 2016.

When Meghan then met Harry, Fraser says: “It was apparent to them both very quickly that they wanted it to be something and they needed to figure that out.”

Later, Fraser recalls warning Meghan about the UK media. “[They] are notorious for doing whatever they can to get a story... they will go through rubbish bins, they’ll try to break into accounts, they’ll do whatever they can to get an exclusive and make money. I remember [Meghan] was quite shocked...”

In episode two, Fraser describes a low-key engagement party they held for Harry and Meghan before the news was announced publicly. “Everyone was dressed in animal onesies and Meg and Harry were in matching penguin onesies because penguins mate for life, and they were so sweet and we had so much fun. She felt like they could take on the world.”

In episode four, Fraser describes Meghan and Harry’s Australian tour as a turning point. “They were so popular with the public that internals at the Palace were incredibly threatened by that.”

In episode five, Fraser says Meghan became a “scapegoat” for the Palace. “They would feed stories on her whether they were true or not to avoid less favourable stories being printed.”

Jill Smoller

Role: Meghan’s Friend

Standout quote: “The next day I found out that she was going to be going on a date with ‘H’”

(ES)

American sports agent Smoller, a former pro tennis player and good friend of Serena Williams, recalls sitting with Meghan in a box at Wimbledon and seeing an adorable actor sitting in the front row next to someone she knew.

“I’m like, hey, how about him?” says Smoller. “I think the next day I found out that she was going to be going on a date with ‘H’.”

Silver Tree

Role: Meghan’s Friend

Standout quote: “We thought it was really funny [that Meghan was dating Prince Harry]. We were like, ‘in what world does this happen?’”

Californian film writer, producer and director Silver Tree also appears in the documentary as a long-time friend – they met when they were both working on Suits and she and her husband Abraham Levy attended Harry and Meghan’s wedding in 2018.

“Meghan texted me from London and said ‘Silver you’re not going to believe this...’. And basically told me that she was going out on a date with him... We thought it was really funny. We were like, ‘in what world does this happen?’” she says in the first episode, laughing.

Tree – who has produced and directed shows like You, Shameless and The Flight Attendant – recalls the text she then received from Meghan after hers and Harry’s second date. “She was just like, Silver, I’m crazy about him”. Tree later talks of how Meghan and Harry “invented” a way for their relationship to work in the very early days post-Botswana.

Later in the documentary, the mother-of-two reveals that she and Meghan always end their text with the phrase: “love wins”.

Silver has a history of publicly sticking up for her good friend Meg. She recently posted about Meghan’s new Archetypes podcast and in March last year she shared an Instagram of them together with the following caption: “This is Meg. A real person - not a cover story. She is one of my very nearest and dearest. Like all her friends I love her madly. She is the friend who insists on always hearing the details of your life, your day, your kids life, your kids day, before hers. Always before hers...

“The friend who stocks her house full of all your very favourite things when you visit and pretends she already had them - just because she wants the moment to be about you not her. It’s always that way with her friends - us before her. When you move to a new city she creates a book of all the special things that city can give you - shares all the little secrets it offers over to you so you’ll feel less homesick. She leaves it on your doorstep so you have it when you wake up.

“On her wedding day she checks in on me the morning of. It’s her day, the world is standing by, it’s a lot - but she wants the day to be special for me. ‘You’ve come such a long way,’ she says. ‘Are you jet lagged?’ she says. ‘I made you a playlist to listen to while you get ready,’ she says...

“She gives you peonies on your birthday. When my son was going through a scary, complicated diagnosis she is the friend who stopped everything and helped map out, step by step, how we would navigate things. She called all the people, all the places when I was too paralyzed to form a plan. That’s another one of her gifts - making you feel like you can get through anything. She’s the friend who shares her all of her secrets with you, because despite having so many reasons to put walls up her heart remains as wide open as it always has been.

“This is Meg before she met H. This is Meg now. She’s always been this person. She’s not a headline. She’s my friend. I love her.”

Ignacio ‘Nacho’ Figueras

Role: Harry’s Friend

Standout quote: “You could tell right away that those were the eyes of someone who had fallen in love”

(ES)

The Argentinian millionaire, Ralph Lauren model and polo player – dubbed the “David Beckham of polo” has been a close friend of Harry’s for more than a decade. He attended their wedding and has long stood up for Harry publicly. In 2019, he released a selection of six fragrances including one named Windsor, which many interpreted as a nod to his “brotherhood of kindred spirits” with the duke.

He appears in the first episode of the documentary and recalls the moment Harry told him he’d met Meghan. “Right after [he and Meghan] met, my wife [Delfina Blaquier], me and him, we had dinner together – and he looked at us and said: ‘Guys, I’ve met a girl. We’ve just met but I think this may be the one’,” the father-of-four recalls.

“You could tell right away that those were the eyes of someone who had fallen in love.”

James Holt

Role: Executive director of the Archewell Foundation

Standout quote: ”Harry and Meghan and the rest of the family had an obligation to perform. If they didn’t they would fall out of favour and any opportunity to write negatively or highlight negatively would be taken. It was a real cutthroat business, and with Meghan there was no limit.”

(ES)

Holt’s first appearance in the series is explaining the royal family’s place as the most senior figures in the entire country. “They are there to represent everything that is Great Britain,” says former Downing Street PR guru, who relocated to Hollywood with the Sussexes from his home in Clapham.

Holt originally started as the Sussexes’ UK head of engagement and communications in September 2020, having previously worked as a reporter and in political PR for the Cabinet Office, Liberal Democrats, 10 Downing Street and Nick Clegg, then as senior communications officer for The Royal Foundation — making him one of Prince Harry’s longest-serving team members.

Last year, he moved across the pond and took over as executive director of Archewell, meaning he is now responsible for the Sussexes’ Netflix and Spotify deals – so it’s little surprise so many he took a prominent role in the documentary.

The show sees him suggesting that increasing numbers of the public might start to question the monarchy as new generations come through. “And I say this with pure adoration for the family, for the people that I work with...,” he adds, choosing his words carefully. “So in order for the institution to survive, it has to modernise...”

Later in the documentary, he recalls someone saying to Meghan in 2016 that if she wanted to explore London and places like the Tate, she had better do it now because her life was about to change.

The ex-journalist goes on to explain how the UK tabloids work and their role in British public life. “They’re the popular press for a reason,” he says. He recalls a particular moment while working for the Sussexes when he was asked to get Harry to “perform” for the press.

He talks of the “invisible contract” and that “obligation” for royals like them to perform and says he “wholeheartedly regrets” suggesting to Harry and Meghan: “sometimes we gotta just play the game” at the time.

In episode four, Holt describes the moment the press coverage of Meghan suddenly turned in the early days of her pregnancy and how much it contrasted to coverage of Kate. He says the tone was “incredibly demeaning”.

Later, he talks about the negative press the couple received for not posing with Archie in the hours after he’d been born, and instead waiting two days to do a photocall.

Afua Hirsch

Role: Journalist and author of Brit(ish)

Standout quote: “I always perceived Prince Harry as just another senior royal who’s a little bit racist, very ignorant... but I have watched him on this journey and seen that he’s really embraced the education and the occasion that is required for someone like him to transform themselves into an anti-racist.”

(ES)

Historian Hirsch is one of several commentators brought onto the show to give viewers a plotted run-through of the British empire and how much race and racism has been tied up in it. The author speaks about what it means to be British – a key subject in her book, Brit(ish), about identity and belonging in 21st-century Britain – and unpicks some of the problematic language around the commonealth, even in its modern form.

“I sometimes call the commonwealth ‘Empire 2.0’ because that is what it is,” she tells interviewers. She says she wasn’t surprised by the controversy arounud Princess Michael of Kent’s “blackamoor” brooch in 2017 because “if you go into a palace or a stately home or anywhere that represents tradition you are likely to be faced with racist imagery”. She says murals and statues “glorify the institution of slavery”.

She acknowledges that Harry has made mistakes in the past, but says she admires him for embracing the “education” that’s needed for “someone like him to transform themselves into an anti-racist”.

Robert Hazell

Role: author of The Role of Monarchy in Modern Democracy

Standout quote: The royals are forced to live their lives inside a “guilded cage”

(ES)

Hazell, an expert on the British constitution, says he thinks it’s hard to overstate the importance of the British monarchy.

The Role of Monarchy in Modern Democracy author goes on to say he doesn’t envy the royal family and their lives inside a “guilded cage” for one moment.

Nicky

Role: Harry’s childhood friend

Standout quote: “As a young kid you don’t necessarily have the language to have that complicated mental health chat”

(ES)

Harry’s schoolfriend Nicky doesn’t give his surname in the documentary but he is happy to talk about meeting the prince at Eton at the age of 13. “We were actually the rooms next door to each other so we could lean out of the window and talk after lights out, but I think as a young kid you don’t necessarily have the language to have that complicated mental health chat, beyond ‘how are you?’, ‘fine’,” he says.

“If anything, he says, they probably veered away from having that discussion [about Diana’s death] because it was such an “emotional hot potato”.

Nicky says he remembers being told about Diana’s death by his mother. “And then, I think like us all, we watched that funeral - and watched him walking behind the coffin... That’s when you first really got to know him or saw an insight beyond a snap or a picture, and felt that you knew him better than you did.”

Later, Nicky explains that he and friends had long said they’d hoped Harry would meet someone like Meghan who already had their own “identity” and succcesses and “had already carved their role in the world”.

Prince Seeiso of Lesotho

Role: friend and fellow Sentebale founder

Standout quote: “He was a young man, straight from Eton, having had massive negative headlines about him.”

(ES)

The two princes set up Aids orphans charity Sentebale together during Harry’s gap year and they’ve remained friends for the 15 years or so since.

Prince Seeiso recalls Harry’s visit to Lesotho in 2004. “In the beginning, he was a young man, straight from Eton, having had massive negative headlines about him,” he explains. “I didn’t know the boy, but I thought well, let’s see what we can do with this young man.”

The prince talks of Harry coming to his country for “time out” from that “very aggressive treadmill” of the British press. “I could see that Harry is very much his mother,” he says.

“It didn’t take very long until we were like brothers,” Harry adds, speaking of the fact that they bonded over losing their mothers.

Abigail Spencer

Role: friend and Suits co-star

Standout quote: “I could just feel everything in her body vibrating... I could just tell [her relationship with Harry] was different”

Fellow Suits actress Spencer (she is not related to Princess Diana, despite the shared surname) recalls meeting Meghan in 2017, at their favourite New York spot Bergdorf Goodman, after Meghan’s trip to Botswana with Harry.

“She’s like, um, I think I met someone and I’m in love. It’s Prince Harry,” Spencer laughs. “I could just feel everything in her body vibrating... I could just tell it was different.”

The Grey’s Anatomy star was a guest at Meghan and Harry’s wedding and attended their baby shower for Archie in New York. She has previously shared that she and Meghan “were born on the same day, hours apart, in the same year... she’s a trusted friend and one of the most glorious people I have ever met.”

Later in the documentary, she is careful to point out that Meghan had a whole life before she met Harry.

Doria Ragland

Role: Meghan’s mum

Standout quote: “I was absolutely stunned that Tom [Thomas Markle] would become part of this circus... certainly as a parent, that’s not what you do.”

(ES)

For an on-screen debut, Ragland’s documentary appearance packed quite the punch. “I’m ready to have my voice heard, that’s for sure,” she tells her interviewers, tearfully.

She begins by introducing herself and admitting the last five years have been “challenging” before going on to describe the moment Meghan whispered to her over the phone that she was going out with Prince Harry. “He was this 6”1, handsome man with red hair,” she says. “Really great manners, he was just really nice and they looked really happy together. Yeah. Like he was the one.”

Ragland goes on to describe the “novelty” of Meghan and Harry’s relationship in the press at first, but how it quickly changed. In episode three she talks about feeling unsafe “a lot”. “I can’t just go walk my dogs, I can’t just go to work, there was alwayas someone there waiting for me, following me to work, I was being... stalked by the paparazzi,” she says.

There are nostalgic moments during the documentary, too, such as when Meghan and her mother are filmed re-visiting their old home in LA, remeniscing about Meghan’s childhood memories. Ragland talks about raising “Meg” with a network of women around her and how she couldn’t help Meghan with her homework because she was smarter than her by that age already.

“She was always so easy to get along with... she was very mature. I remember asking Meg ‘did I feel like her mom’ and she said I felt like her older, controlling sister,” she laughs. “I never forgot that.”

Together, they also revisit Miss Debbie, former principal of Meghan’s old school. “P.s. When I am rich and famous, when I write my life story, I will talk about you and this school so you will be known world-wide,” Meghan reads from an note written by her 11-year-old self to her old teacher.

But Ragland doesn’t shy away from tougher subjects like race, either. In one episode, Meghan recalls the first time she heard her mother being called the n-word and Ragland goes on to say she wishes she’d had that conversation with Meghan, “about how the world sees you”.

Later, when Meghan started receiving negative comments in the press: “I said to her very clearly that ‘Meghan, this is about race’, and Meghan said ‘Mummy, I don’t want to hear that,’” Ragland recalls. “I said you might not want to hear it but this is what’s coming down the pike.”

She and Meghan both address the issue of Samantha Markle, her half-sister from Thomas Markle’s side, and she addresses her ex-husband Thomas Markle, too. “I was absolutely stunned that Tom [Thomas Markle] would become part of this circus...,” she says of his speaking to the tabloids before Meghan’s wedding. “Certainly as a parent, that’s not what you do.”

In episode four, Ragland chokes up when she describes the moment Meghan told her she’d wanted to take her own life. “That really broke my heart, because I knew that it was bad but to constantly be picked at by these vultures, just picking away at her spirit, that she would actually think of not wanting to be here... that’s not an easy one for a mum to hear.

“And I can’t protect her. H can’t protect her.”

Later, Ragland talks about how press coverage around Meghan’s protection of Archie almost suggested he wasn’t her child but “the insitution’s child”. “She was saying: ‘No, this is my baby’”.

Nick Collins

Role: Meghan’s former agent

Standout quote: “My phone just started going crazy” [when Meghan and Harry’s relationship went public)

“My phone just started going crazy. I was like, what is happening?” Meghan’s former agent Nick Collins says of the moment Meghan was announced as Prince Harry’s new girlfriend. “It was just like this tidal wave.”

Later, he recalls meeting her for the first time. He says he doesn’t remember the point at which he found out she was bi-racial, but once he found out he would send her out for black roles and the casting director would be like “what do you mean [she’s black]... well, she doesn’t look it”.

Collins represented Meghan since her Suits days but the pair parted ways in March 2021.

David Olusoga

Role: author of Black and British

Standout quote: “People who come up with these headlines, they are doing so in a newsroom that’s almost entirely white”

Speaking out: David Olusoga, historian and broadcaster, at the Hay Festival in 2018 (Getty Images)

Olusoga speaks after footage is shown of press calling Meghan a princess “straight outta Compton”. “It was brutal, but it was also in some ways unsurprising,” says the broadcaster and historian, who is also a professor of public history at the University of Manchester. He calls that mentality “toxic” and warns that journalism is a “white industry”.

“I wanted it to work,” he later says of Harry and Meghan’s engagement. “As so many people wanted it to work.” But he reminds viewers that the engagement took place amid a time of “toxic” debate about the EU. “Immigration is at the centre of those debates,” he says, adding that immigration is often a “cifer” for race.

Episode two hears Olusoga contextualise Meghan’s joining of the royal family amid a complicated and “selective” British history, from the abolition of the slave trade to the building of the commonwealth. “Meghan represented something,” he says of the feeling among many black and mixed-race people in the UK the time.

Chantelle Humphrey

Role: Meghan’s former personal assistant

Standout quote: “[Meghan] had such a beautiful life, before everything exploded”

Humphrey talks of how Meghan would go to the grocery store in Toronto and get recognised for her role in Suits.

“Other than that, she had so much freedom... She had such a beautiful life, before everything exploded,” she says. After that, it became “scary”.

Misan Harriman, photographer and friend

Role: author of The Role of Monarchy in Modern Democracy

Standout quote: “[Boys at Eton like Harry] were in an echo chamber of absolute privilege that afforded them to live a very particular life, and once you step out of that you realise that there’s a much bigger world”

(Dave Benett/Getty Images for All)

The union of Harry and Meghan made a lot of people of colour in the UK feel “seen”, says Hariman in his first appearance in the documentary. The photographer, activist and chair of the Southbank Centre has been a good friend of the couple since he started capturing many of their key milestones on camera, including Lilibet’s first birthday.

After a discussion about Harry’s mistake of wearing a Nazi costume in 2005 in the documentary, Harriman admits Harry was not so dissimilar to many of the boys he went to school with at his boarding school in Berkshire, Bradfield College. “They were in an echo chamber of absolute privilege that afforded them to live a very particular life, and once you step out of that you realise that there’s a much bigger world.”

Tim Burt

Role: strategic adviser to Archewell and vice chairman of Teneo

Standout quote: “It’s important to remember that the royal family in the UK and the causes that they champion are deliberately non-controversial. Meghan was more of an activist.”

Burt, vice chairman of Teneo and now a strategic adviser to Archewell, talks viewers through the media’s relationship with the royals in episode three. “However aggressive their previous coverage might have been, they still get the right to be on the [royal] rota,” he says of newspapers.

In episode three, Burt talks about the causes the couple champion and how they’re deliberately non-controversial.

Ashleigh Hale

Role: Meghan’s niece and daughter of Samantha Markle

Standout quote: “My impression was that [Meghan’s] relationships were being managed [by the palace] on some level”

Hale’s story is one of the real bombshells of the documentary. The immigration attorney’s biological mother is Samantha Markle but she was raised by her paternal grandparents since the age of two. “For me, they were my parents,” says Hale. “There are some people you just can’t reason with,” she says tearfully later in the documentary when talking about her biological mother.

“It started out with these long emails back and forth to each other,” she says of Meghan reaching out to her in 2006/7. They hit it off, and started going on holidays together. Hale calls Meghan a sister figure, a maternal figure and also a “best friend” and Meghan says “Ash” was like a little sister.

Later in episode three, Hale admits that her communication with Meg became “less and less frequent” as the wedding approached. “My impression was that her relationships were being managed on some level,” she says.

Meghan goes on to describe the moment she and Harry explained to Hale over the phone why it was suggested that she shouldn’t be invited to the wedding if her mother was not. “I think I explained that I was hurt on some level, but I understood where it was coming from,” Hale says, tearfully. “To know that it was because of my biological mother, that this relationship that is so important to me was impacted in that way... it’s been hard.”

Serena Williams

Role: friend

Standout quote: “They as a couple are so tight and rely on each other so much and are each other’s best, best, best friends.”

(Serena Williams/Instagram)

Williams’ friendship with the royal couple has been well-documented over the years. The former tennis icon appears in episode three, describing Harry and Meghan as “best friends”.

“They as a couple are so tight and rely on each other so much and are each other’s best, best, best friends,” she says, recalling their wedding day. “I was just super excited.”

In episode four, Williams talks about how important it was to have Meghan’s culture represented in hers and Harry’s wedding with a gospel choir. “It felt like it was really breaking boundaries, but it wasn’t trying to,” she says.

She later describes talking about the “intimate moment” of Meghan’s babyshower in New York, or how they tried to keep it intimate, at least.

Vicky Tsai

Role: Friend of Meghan’s

Standout quote: “When you whip up enough people into a fervent of hate, it’s not one of those cases of sticks and bones may break my bones but words can never hurt me... they can kill you. The threat is real.”

(Netflix)

Tsai is a friend of Meghan’s and founder of luxury Japanese skincare brand, Tatcha.

She appears as a talking head at many points across the documentary, talking about the fairytale of Harry and Meghan getting together, but the most powerful is when she talks about the trolling Meghan received and how damaging it was to her mental health.

Kehinde Andrews

Role: Author of The New Age of Empire

(ES)

Standout quote: “The UK is perfect at doing this. No one wants to be openly racist because that wouldn’t be civilised and that wouldn’t be British, but it’s perfectly fine to dog-whistle, even nod to it”

Andrews is brought on to discuss the “angry black woman trope” that he believes the media started to use against Meghan “really quite suddenly” when she seemed to be starting to outshine the other royals.

Lorren Khumalo

Role: Former nanny to Archie

Standout quote: “I was like hang on a minute, I need to sit down” [when Harry and Meghan called about her looking after Archie]

(ES)

Khumalo laughs when she remembered that she got a speeding ticket on her way to Frogmore Cottage after being asked to go and meet the Sussexes with new baby Archie. “I see this guy, he’s tall, he’s ginger and he’s walking barefoot... I’d gone and bought a new pair of shoes in Clark’s! Suddenly whatever I thought or felt, the formality just short of slid and I felt so at ease.”

The former nanny says Meghan and Harry were very hands-on parents. Meghan later says Khumalo didn’t just take care of Archie, but she took care of them. “She definitely took care of me,” says the duchess.

Jenny Afia

Role: Partner at Schillings Law Firm who defended Meghan against the Mail on Sunday

Standout quote: “There was a real kind of war against Meghan”

(Netflix)

Evidence that there was a negative briefing from Buckingham Palace against Harry and Meghan “to suit other people’s agendas”.

This is the bombshell claim Jenny Afia makes in episode five of the documentary. The celebrity lawyer has powerfully defended the Duchess of Sussex on several occasions now – in Amol Rajan’s BBC Two documentary, The Princes and the Press, this time last year, then on his sister podcast, Harry, Meghan and the Media, shortly afterwards – and now she appears in their Netflix documentary, too.

“I knew from the first meeting that this was having an horrid impact on Meghan,” she tells interviewers. “There’s a narrative that the royal family adopt a ‘never complain, never explain’ approach to the media and I think Meghan went along with that for a long period, but there was a real kind of war against Meghan... and I’ve certainly seen evidence that there was a negative briefing from the Palace against Harry and Meghan to suit other people’s agendas.

“...This barrage of negative articles about the breakdown of the relationship with her father was the final straw in a campaign of negative, nasty coverage about her. Looking back, it was one of the first acts of them breaking away from the institution.”

Christopher Bouzy

Role: Disinformation expert

Standout quote: “It’s about hatred. It’s about race”

Tech entrepreneur Bouzy is the brains behind Bot Sentinel, a firm that fights disinformation and harassment online and helped to expose the targeted hate campaign against Harry and Meghan.

In episode five he is brought in to talk about the online trolling Meghan received.

Tyler Perry

Role: Friend

Standout quote: “She was afraid of them destroying her or going crazy or them making her think she’s crazy. I saw my mother be abused for years... I knew what it was like... This woman was abused”

Tyler Perry (Netflix)

Perry opens episode six saying he’s not a royal fan but he’d seen something about Meghan’s father in the media that he found to be “hurtful... if he were my father”.

The American actor talks about how hurtful it can be when you become famous and family members become different people around you. He describes how he sent Meghan a note before the wedding, telling her to “hold on” and that “everything in her life had prepared her for this moment... or so I thought”. He said he’d be there, if they ever needed help.

Meghan says she called him years later, in tears, and started listing her fears. “They did not have a plan... they just wanted to be free,” he says.

Meghan then describes how Perry offered them his house for as long as they needed to feel safe, until they had somewhere else to go. The couple endd up staying there for six weeks without anyone knowing. The royal family still thought they were in Canada.

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.