Meghan Markle gave rare insight into her relationship with her sister-in-law, Kate Middleton, during the CBS prime-time special “Oprah With Meghan and Harry” on Sunday night.
The Duchess of Sussex explained that, despite reports stating otherwise, it was the Duchess of Cambridge who made her cry in the weeks leading up to her wedding to Prince Harry in May 2018.
“The reverse [of what was reported] happened,” Meghan said. “And I don’t say that to be disparaging toward anyone, because it was a really hard week of the wedding. And she was upset about something, but she owned it and she apologized and she brought me flowers and a note apologizing and she did what I would do if I knew that I hurt someone, right? To just take accountability for it.”
“What was shocking was, six or seven months after our wedding, that the reverse of that would be out in the world,” she added.
In November 2018, rumors swirled that Meghan had left Kate in tears over the bride-to-be’s demands regarding flower girl dresses. Meghan told Oprah that it was actually Kate who’d been upset about “something pertaining to the flower girl dresses” and that the Duchess of Cambridge’s actions, which she refused to disclose, had made her cry.
“It really hurt my feelings,” Meghan said. “And I thought in the context of everything else going on in those days leading to the wedding that it didn’t make sense to not just be doing what everyone else was doing, which was trying to be supportive knowing what was going on with my dad and whatnot.”
Meghan emphasized that it wasn’t a “confrontation” with Kate and that she has forgiven her sister-in-law. The hardest thing for the Duchess of Sussex was later being blamed by the media for something she didn’t do, especially when it had actually happened to her. Meghan said she still doesn’t understand why the communications team involved with the wedding didn’t back up her claims to the press.
“Everyone in the institution knew it wasn’t true,” she said.
When Oprah asked why the palace didn’t go on the record to dispel the story, Meghan responded, “That’s a good question.”
“I would hope that [Kate] would’ve wanted that corrected,” she continued. “Maybe in the same way that the palace wouldn’t let anybody else negate it, they wouldn’t let her. Because she’s a good person.”
In Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand’s book about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, called “Finding Freedom,” the authors wrote that Kate and Meghan weren’t “at war,” but that they also weren’t the “best of friends,” either.
“At the outset of her romance with Harry, Meghan had fully expected Kate to reach out and give her the lie of the land on everything an outsider to the Firm needed to know,” Scobie and Durand said.
“But that was not how things turned out. Meghan was disappointed that she and Kate hadn’t bonded over the position they shared, but she wasn’t losing sleep over it,” they continued. “According to a source, Kate felt they didn’t have much in common ‘other than the fact that they lived at Kensington Palace.’”
Meghan clarified that she thought the “polarity” depicted between the two women in the media was the problem.
“If you love me, you don’t have to hate her. And if you love her, you don’t have to hate me,” she said.
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