She said that in the run-up to her and Prince Harry’s wedding in May 2018, there was an “obsession” about “tracking down” her parents. “I did everything I could to protect both of them in that media frenzy,” she said, adding that for over a year the tabloids were doing everything they could to find her father’s address, including offering people money for that information. “Once they did, I remember being told there was a huge headline like, ‘We Found Him!’ or ‘We Got Him!’ You’re talking about someone’s father. “And from that point, the tabloids… they moved in to the apartment next door and across from him, descended on this small town, giving him gifts… the whole thing brings us to where we are today.” Meghan recently won her privacy case in relation to the Mail On Sunday publishing excerpts from a letter she wrote to Thomas Markle, with the judge describing Meghan’s “anguish” at the actions of her father as “inherently personal and private.” Oprah then asked whether it felt like “betrayal” when it emerged that a series of seemingly candid paparazzi shots of Thomas Markle preparing for the wedding—reading a book about English castles, researching Meghan and Harry on the internet—had in fact been staged, and that her father was colluding with the tabloids. Meghan hesitated before replying, “I’m just trying to decide if I’m comfortable even talking about that… If we’re going to use the word “betrayal” it’s because when I asked him, when we were told by the comms team this was a story that was going to be coming out… We called my dad and I asked him, and he said no. Absolutely not.” She told him that although the royals had never intervened with the press on her and Harry’s behalf, they might make an exception and try to kill the story—but that “if we do this once, we’re not going to be able to use the same leverage to protect our own kids someday.” The duchess said she told her father, “I just need you tell me, and if you tell me the truth we can help. “And he wasn’t able to do that.” Meghan went on to say, “I look at Archie… and I genuinely can’t imagine doing anything to intentionally cause pain to my child.” She added that the tabloids intentionally held their story about Thomas for a month until the week before the royal wedding to “create drama”—another example, Meghan said, of the media creating rather than reporting news. However, she doesn’t diminish her father’s “accountability” in the whole affair. “They hunted my mom down and you’ve never heard her say a word. She’s remained in silent dignity for four years, watching me go through this.” As for Meghan’s half-sisterSamantha Markle—who wrote a ’tell-all’ memoir called The Diary of Princess Pushy’s Sister—Meghan said, “I think it would be very hard to ’tell-all’ when you don’t know me.” She continued, “I grew up as an only child… and I wished I had siblings, I would’ve loved to have had siblings. That’s why I’m so excited to be pregnant, so that Archie has someone.” She said that she hasn’t seen Samantha in 18 0r 19 years, and that before that it was a decade since their last meeting. They do not have a relationship, Meghan said. “She changed her last name back to Markle, I think she was in her early 50s at that time, only when I started dating Harry. “So I think that says enough.” Next up, Meghan Markle compares herself to Ariel in The Little Mermaid in Oprah Winfrey interview.
