20 things Meghan Markle said about leaving the royal family

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Meghan Markle has had a difficult history with the British royal family. She officially joined their ranks when she married Prince Harry in May 2018, but the fairy tale was short-lived.
As she recounted to Oprah Winfrey in March 2021, one year after her and Harry's royal exit, royal life was trying and painful for her, and she didn't feel accepted in the way she was hoping.
Here are 20 statements she's made about leaving the royal family since she and Harry made that difficult decision.
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She claimed royals speculated about Archie's skin tone

In one of the most spoken about claims she made during the infamous 2021 Oprah Winfrey interview, Meghan Markle said that Prince Harry's family made racist comments about Prince Archie's skin color while she was pregnant with him. Apparently, there were "concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he was born" (via CNN).
"That was relayed to me from Harry," the duchess said.

She claimed Kate made her cry before her wedding

Prior to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's Oprah Winfrey interview, there had been reports that the Duchess of Sussex had made the then-Duchess of Cambridge cry before the Sussexes' wedding over an argument involving the flower girls' dresses. But speaking to Winfrey, Meghan said that "the reverse happened" (via TODAY).
"A few days before the wedding, (Kate) was upset about something — the issue was correct, about flower girl dresses — and it made me cry and it really hurt my feelings," the actress told the interviewer. "I thought in the context of everything else that was going on those days leading to the wedding that it didn't make sense to not be … trying to be supportive."

She called her royal life 'inauthentic'

It's no secret that royal life wasn't the right fit for Meghan Markle — after all, she left it behind within just two years of officially joining it.
In an interview with The Circuit in 2025, the duchess called her life in The Firm "inauthentic."
Explaining what she meant, she added (via Hello!), "It was different several years ago, I couldn't be as vocal. I had to wear nude pantyhose all the time… that was not very myself."

She criticized the royal rule for sharing pictures of her kids

In many ways, Meghan Markle felt stifled by royal life — especially when it concerned her kids. "There's literally a structure by which if you want to release photos of your child, as a member of the family, you first have to give them to the Royal Rota," she told The Cut in 2022, referring to a selection of British media. "Why would I give the very people who are calling my children the N-word a photo of my child before I can share it with the people who love my child? You tell me how that makes sense, and then I'll play that game."

She said she couldn't use her voice as a royal

When Prince Harry and Meghan Markle moved to the U.S. in 2020, the duchess shared one specific reason she was very excited to be back in her home country. "It's something that I look forward to being a part of," she said at the time (via Us Weekly), in reference to politics, and more specifically, the Black Lives Matter movement. "And being a part of using my voice in a way that I haven't been able to of late. So, yeah, it's good to be home."

She said she should have watched The Prince & Me before entering royal life

Meghan Markle felt ill-prepared for royal life and once said she should have at least watched the movie The Prince & Me before diving headfirst into that world. "That would've been really helpful," she told The Cut. "That would've been a very key tutorial to have had in advance of all this."

She denounced how hard royal life makes it to do school runs

When Prince Archie arrived, Meghan Markle wanted to be a devoted mother — but certain aspects of royal life made that too difficult. For instance, she told The Cut that she hated how picking her kid up from school turned into a press event. "Sorry, I have a problem with that," she said at the time. "That doesn't make me obsessed with privacy. That makes me a strong and good parent protecting my child."

She called her life post-meeting Harry "a huge adjustment"

Unsurprisingly, going from a normal-ish life as a TV star to a super abnormal life as part of the royal fold wasn't smooth sailing for Meghan Markle. "It was a big adjustment — a huge adjustment to go from that kind of autonomy to a different life," she told The Cut of life after meeting Prince Harry.

She explained she and Harry didn't want to abandon the royal family

Despite the term "Megxit" making the rounds after Prince Harry and Meghan Markle decided to step down as senior royals and leave the U.K., the Duchess of Sussex once explained that she and her husband didn't want to leave the royals behind in this way. Indeed, the pair wanted to conduct royal engagements but without being paid for by taxes and to live in a country such as Canada or New Zealand, which belong to the Commonwealth. "Anything to just … because just by existing, we were upsetting the dynamic of the hierarchy. So we go, 'Okay, fine, let's get out of here. Happy to,'" the duchess told The Cut. "That, for whatever reason, is not something that we were allowed to do, even though several other members of the family do that exact thing."

She revealed Harry felt like he'd lost his dad

Meghan Markle has been estranged from her father, Thomas Markle, since her wedding, particularly because he wouldn't stop speaking to tabloids. Speaking to The Cut in 2022, she explained that her husband was having a similar experience. "Harry said to me, 'I lost my dad in this process,'" she said of being estranged from King Charles. "It doesn't have to be the same for them as it was for me, but that's his decision."

She said she called the Queen when she heard Philip was in the hospital

Even though Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were largely estranged from the rest of the royals after their exit, they still care about their relatives. "This morning, I woke up earlier than H., and saw a note from someone on our team in the U.K. saying that the Duke of Edinburgh had gone to the hospital," Meghan said in March 2021 (via Us Weekly) about Prince Philip. "I just picked up the phone, and I called the Queen just to check in. I just called, that's what we do." The late Duke of Edinburgh passed away in April of that year.

She didn't know you had to curtsy in private, too

Meghan Markle knew enough about royal life before meeting Prince Harry that she realized you had to curtsy to the Queen — but she didn't know the curtsying continued behind closed doors. "I thought, genuinely, that that was what happens outside," Meghan told Oprah Winfrey (via TODAY). "I thought that was part of the fanfare. I didn't think that's what happens inside. I said, 'But it's your grandmother.' He goes, 'It's the queen.'"

She thought royal life would be like a "fairy tale"

Speaking to Oprah Winfrey in 2021, Meghan Markle made it clear that she had no idea what she was getting into when she joined the royal family. "As Americans especially, what you do know about the royals is what you read in fairy tales," she explained at the time (via Vanity Fair). "It's easy to have an image that is so far from reality."

She shared the traumatic moment she had to go through with a royal engagement despite a nursery fire

While Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were still part of The Firm, they undertook a royal tour in South Africa circa 2019, with Prince Archie in tow. At one point during the trip, Meghan was told that there had been a fire in her baby son's nursery. Though he was luckily unhurt, the parents were understandably "shaken," but still had to put themselves together. "Everyone's in tears, everyone's shaken. And what do we have to do? Go out and do another official engagement," the duchess said on her "Archetypes" podcast (via ABC News). "I said, 'This doesn't make any sense. Can you just tell people what happened?' … And even though we were being moved to another place afterwards, we still had to leave him and go do another official engagement."

She called the late Queen a "shining example" of "female leadership"

Though tabloids painted Meghan Markle as hating the royals, this is far from the truth. In fact, she deeply admired the late Queen Elizabeth, her husband's grandmother. Following the monarch's passing in 2022, the duchess told Variety, "What's so beautiful is to look at the legacy that his grandmother was able to leave on so many fronts. Certainly, in terms of female leadership, she is the most shining example of what that looks like."

She expressed her desire to forgive the royals

When The Cut asked Meghan Markle about whether she could move on from the pain she experienced as part of the royal family, she said, "I think forgiveness is really important. It takes a lot more energy to not forgive. But it takes a lot of effort to forgive. I've really made an active effort, especially knowing that I can say anything."

She shared how meaningful the name "Sussex" is to her

For Meghan Markle, the name "Sussex" holds a deep meaning because it unites her with Prince Harry, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet. "It's our shared name as a family, and I guess I hadn't recognized how meaningful that would be to me until we had children," the Duchess of Sussex told People in 2025. "I love that that is something that Archie, Lili, H and I all have together. It means a lot to me."

She called out the royals' "lies"

In one of the most explosive statements Meghan Markle has made about the royal family, she said that certain members of The Firm were prone to lying if it was in their best interest. "I came to understand that not only was I not being protected but that they were willing to lie to protect other members of the family," she told Oprah Winfrey in 2021 (via BBC News). "But they weren't willing to tell the truth to protect me and my husband."

She said she learned to "protect herself" over the years

Meghan Markle has previously spoken out about the royal family's unwillingness to protect her, so she's had to learn to do it herself. "I think my boundaries became stronger once I came into the public eye in this very … I could think of any adjective to fill the blank. And it would probably work," she told Harper's Bazaar in 2025. "You find different ways to protect yourself, whether that's self-preservation or it's just growing up."

She revealed she could never wear certain colors as a royal

Meghan Markle wasn't truly able to be herself as part of the royal family — and that included the way she dressed, she explained in the 2022 Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan. "Most of the time that I was in the U.K., I rarely wore color. There was thought in that," she said (via People). "To my understanding, you could never wear the same color as Her Majesty if there's a group event, but then you also shouldn't be wearing the same color as one of the other more senior members of the family. So I was like, 'Well, what's a color that they'll probably never wear?' Camel, beige, white."