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Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Blame the Media for Meghan's Dad Missing the Royal Wedding

Photo credit: WPA Pool - Getty Images
Photo credit: WPA Pool - Getty Images

From Town & Country

In the lead up to the royal wedding, Meghan Markle's father, Thomas Markle, hoped to improve his image by participating in a staged photoshoot. To say things didn't go as he planned is quite the understatement. Markle, a retired television lighting director and director of photography, was exposed in the press, an embarrassment to both him and to the royal family. And eventually, he claims, the stress of the scandal caused him have a heart attack. He would go on to miss the royal wedding.

But according to Finding Freedom, a new biography of Harry and Meghan written by reporters Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand, the royal couple places most of the blame for both his behavior and his absence on their big day, on the media.

An excerpt from the forthcoming book was published in the Sunday Times this weekend, and while the Sussexes "were not interviewed and did not contribute" to the book, per a statement from their spokesperson, the text does offer a behind-the-scenes look at the lead-up to the royal wedding, and how the situation with Meghan's father played out.

“He’s vulnerable,” Meghan said to a friend about the staged photoshoots, per Finding Freedom. “He’s been baited. A lot of the tabloid journalists have been coaxing him and paying him. I don’t know if he really even had a chance.”

Per Scobie and Durand, Prince Harry also blames the press for what happened with Meghan's dad.

“The pressure he was put under for six months before he finally cracked and started to participate,” a senior courtier said of Meghan’s father to the authors, “that’s what Harry’s angry about.”

A source "close to the couple" summarized their perspective as follows:

“There is a sort of aggressive intrusiveness and a reckless, irresponsible almost hostility to the media’s actions that’s deeply harmful. I don’t think the paparazzi are the same. I think that has changed. But the sort of ruthless malevolence of some sections of the media, and it is malevolent, is genuinely bad. What they’ve done to her father, drawn him out from his private life and forced him out into the open, and then waving cheques at him, it’s just absolutely terrible. He wanted to live privately. He would have continued to live privately. He would have been at the wedding if the media had left him alone as they were asked to. And there’s no public interest argument to excuse intruding into the private life of Thomas Markle.”

Read the full excerpt here.

Finding Freedom comes out August 11 and is currently available for pre-order.

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