'I'm just supposed to live like this?'
Among the bombshell revelations in Netflix’s new six-part Harry & Meghan docuseries is Meghan Markle’s claim that Toronto police ignored her security fears after she started dating Prince Harry while she was filming Suits in the city.
Meghan, 41, was living and working in Toronto when she embarked on a romantic relationship with Harry in 2016. Suddenly, she was thrust into the spotlight with paparazzi camped outside her Seaton Village home and tracking her every move.
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“I would say to the police — if any other woman in Toronto said to you,’ I have six grown men who are sleeping in their cars around my house and following me everywhere that I go, and I feel scared,’ wouldn’t you say that was stalking?” Meghan says in the documentary, according to ET Canada. “They said, ‘Yes but there’s really nothing we can do because of who you’re dating.'”
In November 2016, Toronto police confirmed they had been called to Meghan’s home, who became a local fixture during the seven years she filmed the legal drama in the city.
“We were called at one point this month for the actions of some media,” Constable Victor Kwong told the Toronto Sun at the time.
In response, Kensington Palace denounced the coverage of Harry’s private life saying, “a line [has been] crossed.”
“So it’s like, I’m just supposed to live like this?” Meghan recalls thinking in the second episode of the docuseries. “They said yeah and then I got a death threat, then things changed because I needed to have security.”
Harry said he felt “helpless” to support her as her private life was turned upside down.
“My house was just surrounded. Just men sitting in their cars all the time, waiting for me to do anything,” Meghan says, according to Yahoo!
“My neighbours texted me saying they’re knocking on everyone’s doors, they’re trying to find you. They had paid certain neighbours to put like a livestream camera into my backyard. Suddenly, it was like everything about my life just got so much more insular. Like all the curtains were pulled, all the blinds were pulled. It was scary. My face was everywhere, my life was everywhere. Tabloids had taken over everything.”
Silver Tree, a friend of Meghan’s and a producer on Suits, says reporters tried to purchase call sheets from production crew members to see if Markle was filming that day. “There were people breaking into the area where their trailers are, trying to get pictures of her coming in and out of her trailer,” Tree says, according to the Washington Post. “I was terrified someone would just be in her trailer waiting for her.”
Meghan and Harry made their public debut as a couple in the fall of 2017 during the Invictus Games, which were held in Toronto that year. The pair was captured holding hands at Nathan Phillips Square and were photographed in a cozy embrace in a private box during the closing ceremony for the event at the Air Canada Centre.
In the series, which aims to dissect their rift with the rest of the Royal Family, Harry recounts being smitten the moment he first saw Meghan on Instagram.
“I was scrolling through my feed and one of my friends and someone who was a friend had this video of the two of them, like a Snapchat,” Harry recalls, revealing that Meghan was wearing a dog face filter in the image.
“I was like, ‘Who is THAT?!'”
When Meghan learned that Prince Harry was interested in her, she admits she didn’t know who he was.
“I asked if I could see his feed. That, to me, was the best barometer. So I went through and it was just like beautiful photography and all these environmental shots, and this time he was spending in Africa.”
After that, they exchanged numbers and a love story was born.
So far, the docuseries has been met with derision by the U.K. press. The Telegraph called the series a “very Californian exercise in grievance,” while the Guardian called it “a one-sided PR effort.”
Meanwhile, talk show host Piers Morgan called the series a “whine-a-thon” that proves the two are “a pair of incredibly rich, stupendously privileged, horribly entitled narcissists.”
“This is worse than Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” he wrote on Twitter. “Something I didn’t think was humanly possible.”
Buckingham Palace has yet to issue a statement on the series, which comes a month before the release of Harry’s autobiography, Spare. But the late Queen Elizabeth II did respond to the couple’s interview with Oprah Winfrey last year, in which Meghan and Harry made allegations of racism. Saying she was “saddened” to hear of the challenges the couple faced, the Queen said “recollections may vary” about Harry and Meghan’s experience, adding, “Harry, Meghan and Archie will always be much loved family members.”
The first three episodes of Harry & Meghan are streaming now on Netflix. The next batch drops Dec. 15.
mdaniell@postmedia.com
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