Back in March, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle sat down for a two-hour interview special with Oprah where the couple revealed why and how they stepped back from the royal family. Now, in the new Apple TV+ docuseries The Me You Can’t See, executive produced by Oprah and Harry, the Duke of Sussex is opening up even more about the trauma he experienced as a child, how he finally started taking care of his mental health, and what it was like to watch his wife struggle when the two lived in the U.K. Below, some of the biggest bombshells from the series’ five episodes.
Prince Harry said he never processed his mother’s death when he was a child.
“For many, many years, I didn’t even think about it,” he said, referring to when his mother Princess Diana died in a car crash when he was only 12 years old. Harry explained that he often felt powerless growing up since he was unable to help his mother, who was continually chased and harassed by paparazzi and the media.
As he got older, Harry said his mental health struggles worsened, and he would get panic attacks and severe anxiety, revealing that ages 28 to 32 were a “nightmare time” in his life. He said he was willing to drink excessively and take drugs in order to mask his feelings, and that he felt stuck within the royal system.
Even now, Harry said that flying to London can be a “trigger” for him. “I wasn’t aware of it at the time when I was younger, but after I started doing therapy stuff I became aware of it,” he said. “I was like, why do I feel so uncomfortable? And of course, for me, London is a trigger, unfortunately, because of what happened to my mum, and because of what I experienced and what I saw.”
Meghan Markle didn’t act on her suicidal thoughts because she didn’t want to put Harry through more pain.
In Meghan’s interview with Oprah in March, she shared that she contemplated suicide during her time within the royal family. Harry then explained in The Me You Can’t See: “The scariest thing for her was her clarity of thought. She hadn’t ‘lost it.’ She wasn’t crazy. She wasn’t self-medicating, be it through pills or through alcohol. She was absolutely sober. She was completely sane. Yet in the quiet of night, these thoughts woke her up. The thing that stopped her from seeing it through was how unfair it would be on me after everything that had happened to my mum and to now be put in a position of losing another woman in my life, with a baby inside of her, our baby.”
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Harry said he was “ashamed” of how he dealt with the situation and that he was “really angry” that the two were seemingly stuck within this system. “I was ashamed that it got this bad,” he said. “I was ashamed to go to my family, because to be honest with you, like a lot of other people my age could probably relate to, I know that I’m not gonna get from my family what I need.”
He also said that “one of the biggest reasons” he decided to step back from the family was the fear of losing his wife. “I then had a son, who I’d far rather be solely focused on, rather than every time I look in his eyes, wondering whether my wife is going to end up like my mother, and I’m going to have to look after him myself,” he said.
Even after the two left the family, Harry said he once found Meghan crying due to the “combined effort of the Firm and the media to smear her” before the Oprah interview aired. “I was woken up in the middle of the night to her crying in her pillow because she doesn’t want to wake me up, because I’m already carrying too much,” he said. “That’s heartbreaking. I held her, we talked, she cried, and she cried, and she cried.”
Prince Harry’s biggest regret is not calling out the racism surrounding Meghan sooner.
In the docuseries, Harry explained that when the British tabloids were constantly attacking Meghan in the press, he could see that “history was repeating itself.” He said he wishes he would have taken more of a stance earlier on in his relationship with Meghan, particularly in “calling out the racism when I did.”
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“My mother was chased to her death while she was in a relationship with someone who wasn’t white, and now look what’s happened,” he said. “You want to talk about history repeating itself? They’re not going to stop until she [Meghan] dies. It was incredibly triggering to potentially lose another woman in my life.”
One of Archie’s first words was “grandma” for Princess Diana.
Harry said that he has “no doubt” his mother would be proud of him, and that he’s living the life “she wanted to live for herself.” “I’ve never felt her presence more as I have done over the past year,” he explained.
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He went on to say that he wishes Diana could’ve met Meghan and his son, Archie. “I’ve got a photo up in his nursery, and it was one of the first words that he said, apart from ‘Mama,’ ‘Papa,’ was then ‘Grandma,’ Grandma Diana,” Harry said. “It’s the sweetest thing, but at the same time, it makes me really sad because she should be here.”
Watch The Me You Can’t See on Apple TV+
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