The Duke of Sussex has claimed that his wife’s miscarriage was caused by stress around the couple’s lawsuit against Associated Newspapers Limited.
In 2021, Meghan won her privacy case against the Mail on Sunday, which is published by ANL, over the publication of a “personal and private” handwritten letter to her estranged father, Thomas Markle.
Meghan sued ANL over a series of articles that reproduced parts of a letter she sent to Thomas Markle, 76, in August 2018.
In 2020, as the case developed, Meghan applied to the High Court to request that the names of five friends who defended her to a US magazine were not released publicly.
“I knew the stress the latest development was having on Meghan,” says the duchess’s former lawyer in the documentary, “and that was that The Mail were going to argue that Meghan’s friends had already spoken about [Thomas’s] letter to People magazine and that Meghan had authorised that interview, which she hadn’t”.
Commenting on the issue, Meghan explains: “I just felt it was important to protect them in the way they were trying to protect me. And that was right in the same week that we moved into our home in Santa Barbara.”
The duchess, who was pregnant at the time of the lawsuit, adds that she hadn’t been sleeping well and had been experiencing pains in her stomach.
“The first morning that we woke up in our new home is when I miscarried,” she says.
“I believe my wife suffered a miscarriage because of what The Mail did,” Harry says in the Netflix film.
“I watched the whole thing. now do we absolutely know the miscarriage was cause by that?
“Of course we don’t, but bearing in mind the stress, 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.”
The Independent has contacted ANL and Edward Verity for comment.
In 2020, the duchess revealed that she had suffered a miscarriage in The New York Times, recalling a morning changing the nappy of her son, Archie, when she felt a “sharp cramp”.
“I dropped to the floor with him in my arms, humming a lullaby to keep us both calm, the cheerful tune a stark contrast to my sense that something was not right,” she wrote.
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