Last night’s Oprah interview has revealed much about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s time in the Royal Family, but one topic that remained unclear was Meghan’s relationship with her father, Thomas Markle. Today CBS This Morning released previously unaired clips from the interview, including one of the duchess talking about her family.
“There was such an obsession about anything in my world including tracking down my parents, and I did anything to protect both of them in that media frenzy,” Meghan said, adding that tabloids “were trying to find my dad, offering people so much money to try to find his address.”
She said that once they did, “from that point the tabloids, they moved into the apartment next door and across from him, descended on this small town, were just giving him gifts, the whole thing brings us to where we are today.”
When Oprah asked, “Did it feel like betrayal? When you found that your father was working with the tabloids?” Meghan paused for a while.
“Yeah, I’m just trying to decide if I’m even comfortable talking about that … if we’re going to use the word betrayal it’s because when I asked him, when we were told by the comms team this is the story that was going to be coming out … the tabloids had apparently known for a month or so but decided to hold until the Sunday before our wedding bc they wanted to create drama. Which is also a really key point in all of this: they don’t really report the news. They create the news.”
She said that when calling and asking her father directly if he had been speaking to tabloids, “he said no absolutely not.”
“I said the institution has never intervened for anything for us, but they can try to go in and kill this story,” Meghan said. “But if they do this once we’re not going to be able to use that same leverage to protect our own kids one day.”
Adding that she stressed to her father she wouldn’t be able to protect her children if she pulled that card for him, she said: “I just need you to tell me and if you tell me the truth we can help. And he wasn’t able to do that. And that for me has really resonated especially as a mother.”
The duchess, looking clearly emotional, said “I’m talking about your grandchildren. So I can’t … I mean, I look at Archie and I think about this child, and I go I can’t, I genuinely can’t imagine doing anything to intentionally cause pain to my child. I can’t imagine it. So it’s hard for me to reconcile that.”
When asked by Oprah if the tabloids did this to him she said, “everyone has accountability” and that her mother, Doria Ragland, has been hunted by tabloids but has “remained in silent dignity for four years watching me go through this.”
Regarding her half-sister Samantha, who has written a tell-all book, the duchess said: “I think it’d be very hard to tell all when you don’t know me. This is a very different situation than my dad. When you talk about betrayal, betrayal comes from someone you have a relationship with. I don’t feel comfortable talking about people who I really don’t know.”
Saying she grew up as an only child and wished she had siblings, it was “really interesting … the last time I saw her must have been 18, 19 years ago. And before that, 10 years before that.” When asked to clarify by Oprah that they weren’t close and didn’t grow up together, Meghan said, “No. She changed her last name back to Markle in, I think she was in her early fifties at that time, only when I started dating Harry. So I think that says enough.”
Speaking in a live interview after the clip aired, Oprah said to CBS This Morning that “from what I gathered, her relationship with her father is similar to what’s happening with Prince Harry and Prince William now. That there’s distance there and maybe with time things will get better, for now, no.”
