In Thursday’s episodes of their Harry & Meghan docuseries on Netflix, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex opened up about Meghan’s miscarriage and who they believe caused it. The couple claimed that the media scrutiny of them took a toll on Meghan, causing her to lose their unborn child.
The couple’s lawyer, Jenny Afia, was featured on Thursday’s docuseries. She also said she noticed Meghan was under considerable stress in the wake of the 2020 privacy breach lawsuit she filed against Associated Newspapers (owners of Mail on Sunday and the MailOnline). Meghan pursued legal action after Mail on Sunday and the MailOnline shared snippets of a private letter she wrote to her father after she married Prince Harry in 2018.
“Meghan and I would be texting at 1 a.m. or 3 a.m., her time. She’d be awake, unable to sleep thinking about this case and the wider issues and the toll it was taking,” Afia recalled. “I knew the stress the latest development was having on Meghan, and that was that the Mail were going to argue that Meghan’s friends had already spoken about the letter to People magazine, and that Meghan had authorized that article, which she hadn’t.”
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Afia also said Meghan was pregnant at the time, adding that the couple was also moving into their new Montecito, California home.
“The first morning that we woke up in our new home is when I miscarried,” Meghan recalled, with Harry saying, “I believe my wife suffered a miscarriage because of what the Mail did.”
“I watched the whole thing,” he added. “Now do we absolutely know that the miscarriage was created caused by that? Of course, we don’t.
“[But] bearing in mind the stress that caused the lack of sleep and the timing of the pregnancy, how many weeks in she was, I can say from what I saw, that miscarriage was created by what they were trying to do to her,” he claimed. “I thought she was brave and courageous, but that doesn’t surprise me because she is brave and courageous.”
After London’s High Court court ruled in her favor, the Mail on Sunday rendered a court-ordered public apology to Meghan in December 2021. And though an appeal against the decision was filed, the Court of Appeal in London upheld the ruling that same month.
“This is a victory not just for me, but for anyone who has ever felt scared to stand up for what’s right,” Meghan said in a statement after the ruling. “While this win is precedent-setting, what matters most is that we are now collectively brave enough to reshape a tabloid industry that conditions people to be cruel, and profits from the lies and pain that they create.”
She added: “From day one, I have treated this lawsuit as an important measure of right versus wrong. The defendant has treated it as a game with no rules. The longer they dragged it out, the more they could twist facts and manipulate the public (even during the appeal itself), making a straightforward case extraordinarily convoluted in order to generate more headlines and sell more newspapers — a model that rewards chaos above truth. In the nearly three years since this began, I have been patient in the face of deception, intimidation, and calculated attacks.”
