Meghan Markle Media Abuse Dismissed by Other Royals, Prince Harry Says

Prince Harry has described his family's reaction to Meghan Markle's media treatment as a "rite of passage" faced by royal brides, in his new Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan which premiered on Thursday.

Discussing the media harassment faced by Meghan in the weeks and months following the actress' relationship with the prince becoming public, Harry said the royal family's reaction was one of ambivalence because a number of them had gone through something similar.

"What people need to understand is that as far as a lot of my family were concerned, everything that she was being put through, they had been put through as well," he told interviewers.

"So it was almost like a rite of passage, and some of the members of the family [were] like 'right, but my wife had to go through that, so why should your girlfriend be treated any differently? Why should you get special treatment? Why should she get protected?'

To this, Harry raised a crucial difference which no senior member of his family had faced: "the race element."

In the series' second episode, both Harry and Meghan discussed her treatment by photographers who would follow her home and interfere with her working life. They also pointed out how the British tabloid media and online platforms took on elements of racism in their reporting.

As cuttings from numerous articles with racially insensitive wording are shown to viewers on screen, Harry said: "Eight days after the relationship became public I put out a statement calling out the racist undertones of articles and headlines that were written by the British press, as well as outright racism from those articles across social media."

Also interviewed as part of the series, alongside a number of the couple's friends, is Meghan's mother Doria Ragland who has kept a blanket 'no comment' rule when it came to discussing her daughter's public life until now.

"I'm ready to have my voice heard," Ragland, 66, told viewers.

In a section of the episode where Meghan recounts her own relationship with her race, explaining that people didn't make an issue of it until she moved to the U.K, Ragland contributes that she wished she had discussed these things with her daughter when she was younger.

"As a parent, in hindsight I would absolutely like to go back and have that very real conversation about how the world sees you," she told interviewers.

When tabloids and social media commenters became critical of Meghan after her relationship became public, Ragland explained that the issue was about race, to which her daughter told her she didn't want to "hear that."

"You may not want to hear it," Raglad said she told Meghan, "but this is what's coming down the pike."

As well as discussions of race in relation to the royals, Meghan also discussed her first meeting with Prince William and Kate Middleton and how this made her aware of the cultural differences between Americans and "Brits."

"When Will and Kate came over and I met her for the first time, they came over for dinner and I was in ripped jeans and I was barefoot," she said.

"It's like I was a hugger, I've always been a hugger...I didn't realize that that is really jarring for a lot of Brits."

"I guess I started to understand very quickly that the formality on the outside carried through to the inside ... that there is a forward-facing way of being and then you close the door, and you go 'Oh ... ok we can relax now.' But that formality carries over on both sides and that was surprising to me."

The first three episodes of Harry & Meghan are available to stream globally only on Netflix now. The final episodes will be released on December 15.

Newsweek approached Buckingham Palace for comment.

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