The online trolling targeting Meghan Markle took an emotional toll.
In new episodes of the Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex tearfully opened up about how threats against her on social media affected her life.
“I think for people to really understand, you know, when you plant a seed that is so hateful, what it can grow into,” she said while seated next to Prince Harry on a couch.
“Just a couple of days ago, I was going through the manual for our security team at home, and on one of the pages that I happened to flip to, it was about online monitoring,” she continued. “And they’re like: ‘If you see a tweet like this, please report it to the head of security immediately.’ And it just said: ‘Meghan just needs to die. Someone needs to kill her. Maybe it should be me.’ ”
“And I was just like, ‘Okay.’ That’s, like, what’s actually out in the world because of people creating hate,” Meghan said.
Through tears, Meghan — who is a mother to son Archie Harrison, 3, and daughter Lilibet Diana, 1 — continued to share how tabloid reports made her fear for her safety.
“I’m a mom. That’s my real life. And that’s the piece when you see it and you go, ‘You are making people want to kill me. It’s not just a tabloid. It’s not just some story. You are making me scared.’ Right?” she said. “That night, to be up and down in the middle of the night, looking down my hallway, like, ‘Are we safe? Are the doors locked? Is security on? Is every— that’s real. ‘Are my babies safe?’ And you’ve created it for what? Because you’re bored or because it sells your papers or it makes you feel better about your own life? It’s real what you’re doing. And that’s the piece I don’t think people fully understand.”
The Duchess of Sussex, 41, said in a previous episode that a comment from a member of the public made her realize that tabloid stories weren’t always dismissed as falsehoods or exaggerations.
“I had still been under the delusion that if it was in a tabloid, no one believed it. Like, it’s a tabloid. Then, we had a walkabout in Liverpool and there was a group of women, and one of them said to me, ‘What you’re doing to your father’s not right,’ ” Meghan recalled, referring to her rift with her dad, Thomas Markle, after he staged paparazzi photos ahead of the couple’s May 2018 wedding. “It was the first time that I went, ‘Oh, my God. People actually believe this stuff.’ And then my entire center was rocked to its core.”
The couple’s lawyer Jenny Afia also appeared in the show and talked about the “toll it was taking” on Meghan to pursue legal action against Associated Newspapers in 2020, after the publisher of the Mail on Sunday and the MailOnline printed sections of a private letter she sent to her father — all while Meghan was pregnant.
“The first morning that we woke up in our new home is when I miscarried,” said Meghan.
“I believe my wife suffered a miscarriage because of what the Mail did,” added Harry. “I watched the whole thing.”
“Now do we absolutely know that the miscarriage was created caused by that? Of course, we don’t,” he continued. “Bearing 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.”
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