The First Time Meghan Met Will and Kate
While discussing her naïveté when it came to royal customs, Meghan opens up about the first time she met her future brother-in-law and his wife, Kate Middleton, when they came over for dinner.
"I remember I was in ripped jeans and I was barefoot," Meghan recalls. "I was a hugger, I've always been a hugger. I didn't realize that that is really jarring for a lot of Brits."
And the formality between Meghan and the couple continued throughout the encounter, she shared.
"I started to understand very quickly that the formality on the outside carried through on the inside," she explains. "That there is a forward-facing way of being and then you close the door and go, 'Oh great, okay, we can relax now.' But that formality carries over on both sides and that was surprising to me."
One of Harry's "Biggest Mistakes"
In episode three, Harry addresses the 2005 incident where he wore a Nazi uniform to a costume party, calling it "one of the biggest mistakes of my life."
"I felt so ashamed afterwards," he continues. "All I wanted to do was make it right."
After the scandal, Harry met with the chief rabbi in London—which he said "had a profound impact" on him—and he also traveled to Berlin to speak with a Holocaust survivor.
"I could have just ignored it and just got on and probably made the same mistakes over and over in my life," Harry explains. "But I learned from that."
In the same episode, Harry discusses the 2017 controversy when Princess Michael of Kent, who is married to Queen Elizabeth's first cousin, wore a "racist" brooch when meeting Meghan.
"In this family sometimes you're part of the problem rather than part of the solution, and there is a huge level of unconscious bias," Harry says. "The thing with unconscious bias is it's actually no one's fault. But once it's been pointed out or identified within yourself, you then need to make it right. It's education, it's awareness. And it's a constant work in progress for everybody, including me."
The Heartbreaking Reason Meghan's Niece Wasn't at the Wedding
While Meghan doesn't have a relationship with her outspoken half-sister Samantha Markle, she has a close bond with Samantha's daughter Ashleigh Hale, who appears in the docuseries. Raised by her paternal grandparents, Ashleigh and Meghan forged a friendship after Samantha reconnected with her daughter in 2007 and Thomas Markle gave Meghan Ashleigh's email address.
"There's a sister element, there's something maternal," Ashleigh says of Meghan. "She's a best friend, she's kind of all the things." And after Samantha began speaking out against Meghan in the press, Ashleigh "stopped talking" to her mother. Which is what made the decision to not invite Ashleigh to her 2018 wedding "painful" for Meghan.
Explaining that they shared a "small" communications team with William and Kate, Meghan says that the "guidance" at the time was to not to have her niece at their nuptials because, as she recalled they put it, "'How do we explain that this half-sister isn't invited to the wedding, but that the half-sister's daughter is?'"
Meghan and Harry called Ashleigh to explain the situation, an emotional conversation that Ashleigh reflected on.
"I think I said I was hurt on some level, but I understood where it was coming from," she says. "To know that it was because of my biological mother that this relationship was so important to me was impacted in that way. To feel like because of her it was taken away. It's been hard."
Wedding Concerns
Leading up to their May 2018 public ceremony, Meghan says the couple was "playing Whac-a-mole" trying to stop the negative stories that were being put out by her half-sister Samantha, other family members and people who claimed to have connections to Meghan in the press. "And then it started to get scary," Meghan continues, when she was sent an envelope containing white powder.
As this was on the heels of the terrorist attacks in London, "there was so much concern about the wedding," Meghan explains. "It was just so scary. They were talking about getting snipers. Behind the scenes of all of that, I was just turtling."
The Truth About Thomas Markle
Just days before her wedding, staged pictures of Meghan's father made their way to the press and the palace's communications team believed he was paid to pose for them. When Meghan and Harry called Thomas to ask for the truth, he denied receiving money from the tabloids. But, Meghan says, "When we hung up, I looked at H and I was like, 'I don't know why but I don't believe him.'"
Things continued to unravel. Though Thomas didn't answer her phone calls, Meghan learned from TMZ he was no longer planning to attend the wedding. Recounting how she continued to get radio silence from her father—even after learning he was in the hospital—the pair flashed visuals of her various text messages to him.
And when Meghan did finally receive a response, it read: "I've done nothing to hurt you Meghan or anyone else I know nothing about 20 phone calls I'm sorry my heart attack is there any inconvenience for you."
Meghan found his response "weird," she says, because "it was not the way he normally texts. It was the opposite." Most notably, he called her Meghan in the message, which she says, "He's never called me [that] a day in my life. It's always been Meg." Because of that, "We kew that his phone had been compromised."
Speaking publicly for the first time in the docuseries, Meghan's mother Doria Ragland says she was "absolutely stunned" that her ex-husband became "part of this circus."
"I felt sad that the media would run with this," Doria says. "That he would capitalize…certainly as a parent, that's not what you do. That's not parenting."
Wedded Bliss
The couple shares intimate details about their 2018 wedding, including how Meghan wanted to spend her morning.
"All I wanted was a mimosa, a croissant and to play the song "Going to the Chapel," she says. "So I did and it was great."
Meghan then reveals Harry chose the song she walked down the aisle to and that their first dance song was Wilson Pickett's "Land of a Thousand Dances."
And when Harry was asked what he was thinking when Meghan was walking towards the altar, he says, "'Look at me, look what I got. Look what I found.'"
"The world was watching us," he says, "but as far as I was concerned, it was just the two of us."
King Charles III notably walked Meghan down the aisle after her father's wedding debacle. "Harry's dad is very charming and I said to him, like, 'I've lost my dad in this,'" Meghan explains. "So him as my father-in-law was really important to me. I asked him to walk me down the aisle and he said yes."
No School For Royal Rules
While addressing the protocols that are in place for royals, Meghan references The Princess Diaries, explaining there is "no class" to teach someone joining the family how to act in public à la Anne Hathway's lessons in the 2001 movie.
"It doesn't happen," Meghan says. "So I needed to learn a lot, including the national anthem." To do so, she turned to Google and practiced on her own. Yet she still felt the media only focused on her missteps, saying, "It was baptism by fire."