Who Was the Real Villain in ‘Harry & Meghan’?

Netflix’s Harry & Meghan was a modern and sometimes morbid fairy tale, diving with forensic detail into the couple’s Instagram-born love story, the complexities of her biracial identity, and each of their family sagas. But if Harry and Meghan, in their telling, are the heroes of the deftly produced docuseries, I wondered, as I fired up part two on Thursday, who would be branded the villain. Would it be the British tabloid media that gleefully tore down the duchess, or perhaps the rigid royal family, to whom the couple alluded in the first part of the show but stopped short of directly condemning?

The answer, it seems is both, though not quite in equal measure. Over six, hour-long episodes, Harry and Meghan made clear that they were crushed by the notoriously toxic tabloids who were so egregiously racist and sexist in covering her, but the Palace’s lack of support—its unwillingness to bend on its tacit quid pro quo agreement with the royal press corps—was the betrayal that broke them. 

“There’s kind of this weird understanding or acceptance that happens,” Prince Harry explains. “You can always say, ‘I didn’t know about this’ or ‘Don’t be ridiculous, are you suggesting that I condone this?’ It’s like, ‘No, but what I am asking is have you done anything to stop it?’ And the answer is no.”

Failure to directly intervene with the press, which the royal family depends on for visibility and seasons of positive coverage (in exchange for vicious intrusion and, in the case of Princess Diana, being hounded right up until her death), was part of the issue. “They knew how bad it was. They thought, ‘Why couldn’t she just deal with it? Everybody else has…’ But this was different,” Prince Harry says, referring to what he’s called “the race element.” “Do we still believe that she should have just sucked it up like other members of the family, or does one think that maybe it’s about time that we stop? But no one would have private conversations with the editors, saying, ‘Enough.’” 

Harry has long resisted the Firm’s relationship to the press, from sticking his tongue out at ever-present photographers as a tot to blasting the “racial undertones”—more like overtones— “of comment pieces; and the outright sexism and racism of social media trolls” when he first went public with Meghan in 2016. “My dad said, ‘Darling boy, you can’t take on the media. The media will always be the media,’” Harry says of his father, King Charles, “and I said, ‘I fundamentally disagree.’”