Despite her A-list success and storybook romance with Prince Harry, Meghan Markle's life hasn't
been easy.
From her familial problems to issues with the British tabloids, the former actress'
road to happiness hasn't been clear.
Here are some of the tragic details about Meghan Markle.
Meghan's parents, Doria Ragland and Thomas Markle raised her together before divorcing
when she was young.
Meghan described the unkind perceptions that met her parents' interracial marriage in a
2015 Elle essay about her upbringing.
She revealed,
"It was the late Seventies when my parents met, my dad was a lighting director for a
soap opera and my mom was a temp at the studio.
They moved into a house in The Valley in LA, to a neighborhood that was leafy and affordable.
What it was not, however, was diverse.
And there was my mom.
[...] [Neighbors] assumed she was the nanny."
Meghan recalled a racially-charged interaction with a, quote, "closed-minded" college classmate,
who implied her parents' races had to do with their divorce.
The woman asked,
"You said your mom is black and your dad is white, right?”
Meghan remembered the woman saying that it "makes sense" they were divorced — and Meghan
understood the implication.
Like many other young women, Meghan struggled with her self-image as a teenager into her
twenties.
In a since-deleted 2014 post on her lifestyle blog The Tig, she wrote about the groups that
left her, quote, "grappling with how to fit in" during her school years.
She explained,
"My high school had cliques: the black girls and white girls, the Filipino and the Latina
girls.
Being biracial, I fell somewhere in between.
So every day during lunch, I busied myself with meetings – French club, student body,
whatever one could possibly do between noon and 1 pm – I was there ... so that I wouldn't
have to eat alone."
Navigating Hollywood in her twenties presented a new set of challenges for her self-esteem.
She went on to admit,
"My 20s were brutal – a constant battle with myself, judging my weight, my style,
my desire to be as cool/as hip/as smart/as 'whatever' as everyone else.
I must have been about 24 when a casting director looked at me during an audition and said,
'You need to know that you're enough.
Less makeup, more Meghan.'"
Meghan's path to Hollywood success also came with some racial speed bumps.
She has been open about the challenges that she's experienced because of her biracial
identity, describing herself in her 2015 Elle essay as an "ethnic chameleon who couldn't
book a job."
Markle revealed that the characters she auditioned for in Hollywood often were assigned a specific
race.
She explained,
"There couldn't possibly be a more label-driven industry than acting, seeing as every audition
comes with a character breakdown: 'Beautiful, sassy, Latina, 20s'; 'African American, urban,
pretty, early 30s'; 'Caucasian, blonde, modern girl next door.'"
She went on to reveal that her "ethnically ambiguous" status often meant she, quote,
"Wasn't black enough for the black roles and [...] wasn't white enough for the white ones."
Many years after the divorce of her parents, Meghan experienced an annulment of her own.
She and ex-husband Trevor Engelson began dating in 2004.
After a lengthy courtship, the couple eventually married in September 2011.
Unfortunately for the newlyweds, her marriage to the producer corresponded with her landing
her breakout role on the USA Network drama Suits, which filmed in Canada eight months
out of the year.
With Meghan shooting in Toronto while her husband stayed behind in Los Angeles, the
distance allegedly contributed to the couple's eventual divorce in 2013.
A report in Woman's Day claimed that Meghan and Engelson found maintaining a long-distance
relationship to be challenging and that their marriage began to fall apart.
By August 2013, their relationship was over, and Meghan and Engelson ended their marriage
in a no-fault divorce.
She may have ended her marriage by mail, according to claims by royals biographer Andrew Morton
in his 2018 book Meghan, A Hollywood Princess.
Morton wrote,
"A wealthy entrepreneur friend claimed the marriage ended so abruptly that Meghan sent
Trevor her diamond wedding and engagement rings back by registered mail."
Morton also claimed that Engelson angrily denied an interview request for the book,
telling Morton,
"I have zero to say about her."
As an American, Meghan has admitted that she didn't grasp how the British media would treat
her relationship with Prince Harry.
She's claimed that her British friends had warned her against dating him, fearing the
negative repercussions on her life.
Speaking to ITV as part of the 2019 documentary Harry and Meghan: An African Journey, Meghan
described,
"When I first met my now-husband my friends were really happy because I was so happy,
but my British friends said to me, 'I'm sure he's great but you shouldn't do it because
the British tabloids will destroy your life.'
And I very naively [thought], 'I'm American, we don't have that there, what are you talking
about, that doesn't make any sense.'"
As Meghan would unfortunately come to realize, her British friends' warnings about the tabloids
would turn out to be accurate.
"I never thought that this would be easy, but I thought it would be fair, and that's
the part that's really hard to reconcile."
Meghan admitted that she didn't agree with the longstanding idea of British stoicism
referred to as the "stiff upper lip."
She explained,
"I've said for a long time [...] It's not enough to just survive something, I think
that's not the point of life.
You've got to thrive, you've got to feel happy, and I think I really tried to adopt this British
sensibility of a stiff upper lip, but I think that what that does internally is probably
really damaging."
When Meghan began dating Prince Harry, her life transformed — she lost the privacy
and freedom she enjoyed as a more minor celebrity.
The many changes Meghan made in her life prior to her May 2018 wedding included selling her
house in Toronto, becoming baptized into the Church of England, and leaving Suits.
As part of her introduction to the royal family, Meghan had to comply with a set of rules intended
to govern her behavior as a duchess.
Thanks to the Queen's disdain for selfies, garlicky dishes, and women wearing skirts
without tights, Meghan likely couldn't indulge in any of those behaviors without some backlash.
She also erased her online personality from the internet, shutting down her lifestyle
blog The Tig and wiping her personal social media profiles — posting instead from her
joint "Sussex Royal" Instagram account with Prince Harry.
However, Meghan and Harry's announcement in January 2020 that they would be separating
from their roles in the British royal family presented new possibilities for Meghan to
regain some of the pleasures of normal civilian life.
From the very beginning of her relationship with Prince Harry, Meghan was vilified by
the British press, with tabloids publishing sexist, racist, and classist comments about
her.
In a then-unprecedented move early in their relationship, Harry issued a public plea petitioning
the press to respect the privacy of his then-girlfriend in 2016, issuing a statement condemning the,
quote, "wave of abuse and harassment" that met Meghan once their relationship went public.
Offensive tabloid headlines aimed at Meghan included the Daily Mail surmising about Meghan's,
quote, "exotic DNA [and] straight-outta-Compton" upbringing, and in 2019, BBC presenter Danny
Baker was fired after posting a tweet comparing Meghan and Prince Harry's then-infant son,
Archie, to a chimpanzee.
Meghan fought back, breaking royal protocol — with British royals normally playing nice
with the press, even in the face of negative coverage — by suing The Mail on Sunday tabloid
in 2019.
Following news of the lawsuit, Prince Harry issued another statement supporting his wife,
writing,
"Unfortunately, my wife has become one of the latest victims of a British tabloid press
that wages campaigns against individuals with no thought to the consequences – a ruthless
campaign that has escalated over the past year, throughout her pregnancy and while raising
our newborn son."
When Meghan and Harry stepped away from the royal family in 2020, the couple sent letters
to a number of British tabloids, informing them of a new "zero engagement" policy locking
them out.
It came as no surprise that Meghan's mother was one of the only members of her family
who attended her 2018 royal wedding.
In the years since Markle's relationship with Harry went public, she's experienced a specific
kind of betrayal at the hands of her family members, including her father, Thomas, and
his two children from a previous marriage, Thomas Markle Jr. and Samantha Grant.
Thomas Markle Senior embarrassed his daughter the week before her May 2018 nuptials by staging
paparazzi photos that showed him trying on tuxes and studying British history, eventually
telling TMZ that the images were "stupid and hammy," and later skipping his daughter's
wedding.
Markle Sr. came out against his daughter again in 2020, when Meghan and Prince Harry announced
they would be stepping away from their royal duties, telling Us Weekly that he was "disappointed"
by their decision.
Meghan's half-siblings haven't been any kinder, with Markle Jr. allegedly writing a letter
to Prince Harry in 2018 slamming Meghan as a, quote, "jaded, shallow, conceited woman,"
according to In Touch.
"I feel a bit betrayed being shoved off to the side like I don't exist."
Markle Jr. eventually walked back his comments, but his sister, Samantha Grant, hasn't stopped
attacking Meghan in the press, beginning in 2016, when she called Meghan a "social climber,"
according to The Sun.
Grant, who began publicly going by the name Samantha Markle, criticized Meghan for not
inviting her to her wedding in 2018, and in 2019 tweeted that Meghan was a "narcissist,"
according to Yahoo Style.
In the years leading up to Prince Harry and Meghan announcing they were stepping away
from their royal duties in January 2020, Meghan was dogged by rumors that she and her sister-in-law,
Prince William's wife Kate Middleton, were embroiled in a feud.
Buzz continued to swirl years after Meghan and Prince Harry's wedding in 2018, with Tatler
reporting in 2020 that Meghan and Kate had an argument in the weeks leading up to Meghan's
wedding.
The publication pointed to Harry and Meghan's departure from their royal duties as a new
source of stress on Kate.
Tatler reported,
"Kate is furious about the larger workload.
Of course she's smiling and dressing appropriately but she doesn't want this.
She feels exhausted and trapped."
While the royals issued a statement shooting down the Tatler article as inaccurate, the
story wasn't the first time the press surmised about the bad blood between the wives of the
British royal brothers.
In 2019, Us Weekly reported that Meghan and Kate had an unpleasant exchange over Christmastime
2018 about their frustrations with each other, with rumors following them throughout 2019
claiming that the friendly moments they shared in public were actually PR stunts.
In a heartbreaking op-ed in The New York Times, Meghan revealed that she suffered a miscarriage
in July 2020.
While changing the diaper of her first child, Archie, the Duchess of Sussex wrote that she
"felt a sharp cramp" and immediately knew something was wrong.
She explained,
"I dropped to the floor with him in my arms, humming a lullaby to keep us both calm, the
cheerful tune a stark contrast to my sense that something was not right.
I knew, as I clutched my firstborn child, that I was losing my second."
The former actress leaned on the strength of her husband as they mourned together.
She wrote,
"Sitting in a hospital bed, watching my husband's heart break as he tried to hold the shattered
pieces of mine, I realized that the only way to begin to heal is to first ask, 'Are you
OK?'"
The moment made Meghan realize the power of what she called her "off-the-cuff" reply to
an ITV reporter who asked a similar question in reference to her combative relationship
with the press.
"Also thank you for asking because not many people have asked if I'm okay."
Markle further revealed that the essay was an effort to not only dispel the "taboo" surrounding
miscarriage, but to also discuss the polarization and isolation that left most of the world
"feeling more alone than ever" in 2020.
In the grief we all share, she found hope, writing,
"For the first time, in a long time, as human beings, we are really seeing one another.
Are we OK?
We will be."
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