Harry blames himself for the end of Meghan's relationship with her father Thomas Markle

In their Netflix docuseries, "Harry & Meghan," which was released Thursday on Netflix, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex open up... Prince Harry is found to blame himself for the falling out between his wife, Meghan Markle, and her father, Thomas Markle. "She had a father before this, and now she doesn't," Harry says in the couple's documentary series, which began airing Thursday morning. "And I was the one who took on that responsibility. If Meg wasn't with me, her father would still be her father."

 

The rocky relationship between Meghan, 41, and Thomas, 78, became high-profile before the royal wedding in 2018. At one point, it was revealed that Thomas - a former lighting director for TV soaps and sitcoms - was accepting payments from a British paparazzo and staging photos of himself getting ready for the wedding.

Meghan reveals in an episode of the new series that she found out her father wouldn't walk her down the aisle thanks to a story published by TMZ. "I find out you won't be coming to our wedding... from a tabloid," she exclaims.

 

In a shocking 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, the Duchess of Sussex called her father's actions a "betrayal" that she could not "reconcile."

As the drama ensued and tension over their relationship seemed to grow, Meghan's contact with her father diminished, with the tabloids publishing only four days before the wedding that Thomas had been hospitalized with a heart attack. 

And then suddenly they were saying he was in the hospital," she recalls in the documentary series. "I said, 'What's going on? Please pick up the phone."

 

Text messages between Meghan and Thomas revealed that while he was talking to the media, he wasn't responding to his daughter. At one point, the "Suits" alum texted her father to stop talking to the press. "You haven't returned any of our 20 calls since we spoke Saturday morning, which only adds to the pain you've caused," she wrote.

The relationship between the Markles is still fragile these days, even though Queen Elizabeth II reportedly encouraged Meghan to reconcile with Thomas before the monarch's death in September.

 

"The Queen could see how damaging the situation was between Meghan and her father, and she talked to Meghan about it and tried to encourage her to talk to Thomas," wrote royal expert Katie Nicholl in her book "The New Royals. »