Prince Harry blames 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 have a father,” Harry says in the couple’s Netflix docuseries, “Harry & Meghan,” which began streaming on Thursday morning. “And I shouldered that. If Meg wasn’t with me, then her dad would still be her dad.”
The struggling relationship between Meghan, 41, and Thomas, 78, became a media circus leading up to 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 preparing for the wedding.
Meghan reveals in the third episode of the new series that she found out her father would not be walking her down the aisle through a story published by TMZ.
“I’m finding out that you’re not coming to our wedding … through a tabloid!” she exclaims.
In a bombshell 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, the Duchess of Sussex called her father’s actions a “betrayal” that she could not “reconcile.”
As drama ensued and the strain on their relationship seemed to grow, Meghan’s contact with her father lessened, with tabloids publishing just four days ahead of the wedding that Thomas had been hospitalized due to a heart attack.
“And then suddenly they were saying he was in the hospital,” she recalls in the docuseries. “I said, ‘What’s going on? Please just pick up the phone.'”
Text messages between Meghan and Thomas revealed that while he was speaking to the media, he wasn’t responding to his daughter.
At one point, the “Suits” alum texted her dad and asked him to stop speaking to the press.
“You haven’t returned any of our 20+ calls since we all spoke on Saturday morning; which only adds to the hurt you’ve been causing,” she wrote.
The Markles’ relationship is still on thin ice these days, despite Queen Elizabeth II reportedly encouraging Meghan to make up with Thomas prior to the monarch’s death in September.
“The Queen could see how damaging the situation was between Meghan and her father, and she did speak to Meghan about it and tried to encourage her to talk to Thomas,” royal expert Katie Nicholl wrote in her book “The New Royals.”
