Prince Harry says his brother, Prince William, yelled at him during a family meeting.
“It was terrifying to have my brother scream and shout at me and my father say things that just simply weren’t true and my grandmother quietly sit there and sort of take it all in,” Harry said during the fifth episode of Netflix’s “Harry & Meghan” documentary series, which became available on Dec. 15.
“But you have to understand that from the family’s perspective, especially from hers, there are ways of doing things and her ultimate sort of mission, goal-slash-responsibility is the institution. People around her are telling her, 'By the way, that proposal or these two doing X, Y, Z is going to be seen as an attack on the institution.' Then she’s going to go on the advice that she’s given.”
Harry said the experience was difficult and they left that day without any sort of resolution, while claiming his brother's press team used the media to rip them apart.
“It was really hard,” he said. “The meeting finished without any solidified action plan. I think, from their perspective, they had to believe that it was more about us, and maybe the issues that we had, as opposed to their partner, the media, and themselves, and that relations that was causing so much pain for us. They saw what they wanted to see.”
Harry said his relationship with William had clearly deteriorated.
“I mean, the saddest part of it was this wedge created between myself and my brother, so that he’s now on the institution’s side,” he said. “And I get — part of that I get. I understand, right? That’s his inheritance, so to some extent it’s already ingrained in him that part of his responsibility is the survivability and the continuation of this institution.”
Harry said there was a story that he and Meghan were leaving the family because his brother had bullied them into doing so and that the family released a statement denying the claim, even though he never signed off on it.
“Once I got into the car after the meeting, I was told about a joint statement that had been put out in my name and my brother’s name squashing the story about him bullying us out of the family,” he said.
“I couldn’t believe it. No one had asked me. No one had asked me permission to put my name to a statement like that. And I rang M (his wife) and I told her, and she burst into floods of tears because within four hours, they were happy to lie to protect my brother, and yet, for three years, they were never willing to tell the truth to protect us.”
At that moment, the former Meghan Markle realized changing the narrative was going to be impossible.
“Suddenly, what clicked in my head was, ‘It’s never going to stop.’ Every rumor, every negative thing, every lie, everything that I knew wasn’t true and that the palace knew wasn’t true and internally they knew wasn’t true that was just being allowed to fester,” she said.
“So there was no other option to this point,” Harry said. “I said, ‘We need to get out of here.’”
NBC News has reached out to Buckingham Palace, but there has been no comment.
The second volume of “Harry & Meghan” is now available to stream on Netflix. The couple’s Archewell Productions is one of three production companies involved in the project.