Liz Garbus, whose recent Harry & Meghan docuseries chronicled Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s split from the Royal Family, has accused Buckingham Palace of lying about the hit Netflix show.
“Buckingham Palace said that we didn’t reach out for comment when we did,” she told Vanity Fair. “They did that to discredit us… and by discrediting us, they can discredit the content of the show.”
The filmmaker went on to compare the palace’s purported behaviour to the surreality of Alice Through the Looking Glass.
Harry & Meghan opened with a title card that said: “Members of the Royal Family declined to comment on the content within the series.”
In December, a palace source told HuffPost that Netflix had made no attempt to speak to the royal household, Buckingham Palace or Kensington Palace.
Meanwhile, a Netflix source insisted that the offices of Prince William and King Charles had been contacted before the premiere of Harry & Meghan.
In any case, the Royal Family’s fracture was evident long before the show dropped.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex famously left the monarchy in 2020 for new pastures in California.
Harry told Oprah Winfrey in 2021 that he had felt “trapped within the system,” while Meghan said that she had experienced suicidal feelings as a senior royal – and faced racist concerns over their son’s skin colour.
This year, Harry’s memoir Spare has sparked further discussions around family dysfunction among the royals.
Harry & Meghan delivered the most-viewed documentary debut in Netflix history, with 28 million households consuming the first half of the series in its first four days.
The couple at the centre of the show “certainly did see this documentary, and do see it, as very much their love story,” Liz told Vanity Fair.
“Their interest was very much in telling their love story from their point of view, as opposed to the love story as told by others, and to share their personal archive in order to have that look behind the curtain.”
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