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Meghan Markle struggled to adjust to royal life despite Prince Harry's attempts to prepare her for it.
"I tried to warn you as much as possible, but I think both of us were totally surprised by the reaction after the first five, six months, which we had to ourselves [and] what actually happened from then," Harry said in the couple's engagement interview.
Harry shared they were "totally unprepared" for the public curiosity surrounding their relationship.
"I've never been part of tabloid culture. I've never been in pop culture to that degree and lived [a] relatively quiet life, even though I focused so much on my job," Meghan, who was a working actress at the time, admitted.
Years after the Sussexes' engagement interview, the pair left the U.K. In their explosive tell-all interview, the duo implied that the British press' coverage of Meghan prompted their decision to step down from their roles. Most importantly, Meghan admitted that she was fearful for Prince Archie's safety, as the youngster wasn't born with security privileges.
"We haven't created this monster machine around us in terms of clickbait and tabloid fodder. You've allowed that to happen, which means our son needs to be safe," Meghan told Oprah Winfrey during their CBS interview.
"We're talking about the U.K. press here, right? And this … the U.K. is my home. That is where I was brought up," Harry said. "So yes, I've got my own relationship that goes back a long way with the media. I asked for calm from the British tabloids — once as a boyfriend, once as a husband and once as a father."
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Meghan later alluded to the royal family enabling the tabloids to publish negative stories about her.
"I think there's a reason that these tabloids have holiday parties at the Palace. They're hosted by the Palace, the tabloids are. You know, there is a construct that's at play there," Meghan explained. "And because from the beginning of our relationship, they were so attacking and inciting so much racism, really, it changed our . . . the risk level, because it went . . . it wasn't just catty gossip."
"It was bringing out a part of people that was racist in how it was charged," she continued. "And that changed the threat. That changed the level of death threats. That changed everything."