Prince Harry’s description of Meghan Markle as the “new woman in my life” to Prince William and Kate Middleton, revealed in his 2023 memoir, has gone viral on social media, with clips from the couple’s relationship—along with a soundbite from the prince’s audiobook—featuring in a new TikTok video.
Harry and Meghan met in the summer of 2016, while the future duchess was visiting London during a filming break in her hit legal TV show Suits.
After dating for a short time, Harry took Meghan to Botswana for a vacation where they have since said the relationship quickly became serious. They announced their engagement in November 2017 and married in May 2018.
Together the couple have two children: Prince Archie, born 2018; and Princess Lilibet, born 2021.
In his record-breaking memoir Spare, published in January 2023, Harry gave readers an insight into his early relationship with Meghan and how members of his family reacted to the possibility of an American actress joining their ranks.
In one chapter, an audio clip from which features in the new viral video uploaded to TikTok by user elikali4.0, Harry revealed how he had broken the news to William and Kate that he and Meghan had started seriously dating, news that effected a surprising result from the prince and princess.
“I casually mentioned that there was…a new woman in my life,” he commented.
“They surged forward. ‘Who is she?’ ‘I’ll tell you, but please, please, please, I need you both to keep it a secret’.
“Yes, Harold, yes, yes—who is it?” he wrote of William and Kate’s response.
“She’s an actress…She’s American…On a show called Suits.”
“Their mouths fell open. They turned to each other. Then Willy turned to me and said: ‘F*** off! ..No way…Impossible!”
“I was baffled, until Willy and Kate explained that they were regular—nay, religious—viewers of Suits. Great, I thought, laughing. I’ve been worrying about the wrong thing. All this time I’d thought Willy and Kate might not welcome Meg into the family, but now I had to worry about them hounding her for an autograph.”
The video features the prince’s audio clip overlayed with footage from the couple’s engagement interview, their first Christmas appearance at the royals’ Sandringham church service and a joint appearance with William and Kate at the Royal Foundation Forum in 2017.
The TikTok clip also features Harry’s affectionate description of former royal nanny Tiggy Pettifer, a figure who has remained present throughout his adult life.
The clip has been viewed over 250,000 times on the social media site since its upload on December 9, and has received in excess of 10,000 likes and 400 comments, many of which have praised the couple, others voicing surprise at the claim William and Kate were religious viewers of the Suits show.
Meghan starred in Suits from its first episode in 2011, up until its seventh season, which finished airing in 2018. Her role was that of paralegal Rachel Zane, and the character was written out of the show with a wedding episode that aired in the build-up to Meghan’s real wedding to Harry at Windsor Castle on May 19, 2018.
Suits aired for another two seasons, wrapping finally in 2019, and has seen a revival in public interest over the past year.
In July 2023, after being added to the Netflix streaming library in the U.S., the show broke the Nielsen record as the most viewed acquired title for a single week ever. For the viewing period June 26 to July 2, over 3.1 billion minutes of the nine-season show were streamed.
