Tyler Perry has been a guardian angel for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. In the final episode of the Harry & Meghan docuseries, Tyler reveals that he had reached out to Meghan before her 2018 wedding after seeing all the drama surrounding her father, Thomas Markle.
“I immediately empathized with her. This was before the wedding. And I sent her a note, just praying for her just to be able to move through it and hold on, and let her know that everything in her life had prepared her for this moment, or so I thought,” Tyler says. Meghan reveals that Tyler told her he would be there for her if she ever needed him, despite having never met.
When Meghan was in Canada as she and Prince Harry were trying to figure out what they going to do next, she called Tyler. “I was just a wreck. I was just crying and crying,” Meghan says. At the time, Meghan opened up to Tyler about everything she was experiencing.
“I could hear the fear,” Tyler admits. “It was palpable. I mean, I could hear it. So I asked her, what was she afraid of? And she took a deep breath and she started listing the things, ‘I’m afraid of…’ And I said to her, ‘Every one of your fears are valid.'”
Tyler goes on to say that Meghan was “afraid of them [the media] destroying her, or going crazy, or them making her think she was crazy.” He adds, “I saw my mother be abused for years. I knew the symptoms. I knew it was like… This woman was abused. And so was he.”
The media mogul eventually asked how he could help the couple. Prince Harry and Meghan had already announced they were stepping down as senior royals and were living in a house on Vancouver Island, Canada. Everyone in the world knew where they were, and now they had no security to keep them safe.
“They just wanted to be free. They wanted to be free to love and be happy. They didn’t… They did not have a plan,” Tyler says.
Tyler offered the Duke and Duchess of Sussex his Los Angeles mansion for them to stay in as long as they needed just before the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world. He also gave them security. “We were there for 6 weeks and no one knew. My family still thought I was in Canada,” Prince Harry admits. When Harry and Meghan welcomed their daughter, Lilibet Diana, they made Tyler her godfather.
Once the media learned where Prince Harry and Meghan were staying, Tyler had a fence constructed around the house to keep out photographers. Helicopters and drones swarmed the mansion looking to get footage of Harry and Meghan. The couple did eventually move to their home in Santa Barbara later in 2020.
While this was happening, Meghan was in the midst of a lawsuit with Daily Mail for publishing a letter she wrote to her father without her consent. “The first morning that we woke up in our new home is when I miscarried,” Meghan admits.
Prince Harry blames the outlet for his wife’s miscarriage. “I believe my wife suffered a miscarriage because of what the Mail did. I watched the whole thing. Now, do we absolutely know that the miscarriage was created, caused by that? Of course we don’t. But bearing in mind the stress that that caused, the lack of sleep, and the timing of the pregnancy, how many weeks in she was, I can say, from what I saw, that miscarriage was created by what they were trying to do to her.” All episodes of Harry & Meghan are now available on Netflix.