Meghan has spoken of the first death threat she received leading her to ask for private security in her bombshell new Netflix documentary series with Prince Harry.
In episode two, the Duchess of Sussex describes how she received a death threat while she was in Toronto and claims the press paid her neighbours to keep a 24/7 livestream pointed towards her backyard after her relationship with Harry went public.
She says: “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 who follow me everywhere that I go and I feel scared, wouldn’t you say that it was stalking?
“And they said yes but there’s really nothing we can do because of who you’re dating.
“I was like so I’m just supposed to live like this?”
She adds matter-of-factly: “And then I got a death threat and things changed because I needed to have security.”
Meghan says of her Toronto home: “They (press) had paid certain neighbours to put live stream cameras into my backyard.”
The documentary released on Thursday came after a leading Met officer said Meghan also faced very real threats while she was in the UK.
Neil Basu, who is stepping down as Assistant Commissioner of Specialist Operations at Scotland Yard, told Channel 4 News “disgusting” threats were made against the Duchess of Sussex.
Asked if they were credible, he said: “Absolutely, and if you’d seen the stuff that was written and you were receiving it… the kind of rhetoric that’s online, if you don’t know what I know, you would feel under threat all of the time.”
In the same episode, Harry says after their relationship became public the press intrusion became a “feeding frenzy”.
Harry compared the treatment to his mother Princess Diana’s treatment, saying: “To see another woman in my life, that I love, go through this feeding frenzy, that’s hard. It is basically the hunter versus the prey.”
Prince Harry also spoke of his “terror” that Meghan would be “driven away by the media”.
Speaking in the first episode of the Netflix documentary, he said: “The same media that had driven so many different people away from me.”
He added: “I knew that the only way that this could possibly work was by keeping it quiet for as long as possible.”
Meghan said: “At the beginning, our relationship was this guarded little… guarded treasure.”
Harry complains that dating Meghan “became a combination of car chases, anti-surveillance driving and disguises, which isn’t a particularly healthy way to start a relationship but we always came at it with as much humour as possible.”
He adds: “Whenever we saw each other we would give each other a massive hug and try and have as much of a normal life as possible.”
In the first episode, the Duchess of Sussex says the couple have “never been allowed to tell our story... until now” as they talk about their first tentative steps toward romance.
Harry reveals he spotted his future wife back in 2016 while scrolling through his Instagram feed and they eventually started privately messaging and arranging for drinks.
The couple even share those first messages, with Harry writing: “So come on – what u doing tomorrow night? Hope you’re having fun over there!”
