The couple criticises the paparazzi’s persistent harassment throughout the first three episodes of Netflix’s “Harry & Meghan” docuseries, with the Duke of Sussex claiming that being swarmed by cameras makes up most of his early memories.
Harry recalled how the “Paparazzi used to harass us to the point where we had to be forced into smiling and answering questions to their travelling press pack,” and that made me feel really uncomfortable from the get-go.” Harry said.
He continued by saying that he had always been told not to respond to cameras and to never “feed into it.”
And while the press were allegedly supposed to give him and his brother Prince William privacy while attending school, it never worked and there was always photographers.
“I remember thinking how am I ever going to find someone who is willing and capable to be able to withstand all the baggage that comes with being with me?” he said.
Harry, whose ex-girlfriends include Chelsey Davy and Cressida Bonas, claimed that women would second-guess their relationship with him due to the press surrounding the relationship.
“Every relationship that I had within a matter of weeks or months were splattered all over the newspapers and that person’s family harassed and their lives turned upside down,” he said.
“When I got to meet M, I was terrified of her being driven away by the media. The same media that had driven so many other people away from me.”
Markle, meanwhile, claimed in the second episode of the documentary that paparazzi paid her neighbors in Toronto — where she filmed her show “Suits” in the early days of her relationship with Harry — to live-stream her backyard.
Harry and Markle have been vocal about their disdain for the UK press since they quit the royal family in March 2020, even claiming it was the “toxic” media that led them to leave.
“We all know what the British press can be like and it was destroying my mental health,” he told James Corden in 2021. “So I did what any husband and what any father would do — I need to get my family out of here.”