Let's not call her Meggitt anymore" Meghan Markle has been forever under fire for her and her husband, Prince Harry, stepping down from their lives as active members of the royal family in 2020, but friends of the couple are trying to set the record straight.

Journalist Bryony Gordon told the Mirror that Harry wanted to leave the royal family when he was younger - in her words, he "wanted out of the crazy royal cult," but only stepped away because of his wife. She calls the couple's Netflix documentary "neither contrived nor fake" and says the show portrays "a very normal couple in a pretty extraordinary situation."

Harry himself admits to being wary of royal life as a child, saying, "I remember being harassed by the paparazzi a lot and having to smile and answer questions to the traveling press. That made me feel really uncomfortable from the beginning."

Harry could not leave the company at such a young age, but his meeting with Princess Meghan gave him the confidence to finally take the leap.

"From his days as a schoolboy at Eton, and perhaps even as a prep school, Harry as a nine-year-old boy wanted to escape the insane royalty worship, including being forced to pose for pictures with his brother and cousins during ski vacations at Klosters," Gordon Gordon told The Telegraph. In the free-spirited Meghan, he not only met his match, but also triggered a process that had been going on since childhood.

As further evidence, during a guest appearance on the Armchair Expert podcast in May 2021, Harry told host Dax Shepard, "In my early 20s, I said, 'I don't want to work like this, I don't want to be here, I don't want to do this. How am I going to settle down and have a wife and family when I know it's going to happen again? (Harry met Megan in the summer of 2016, when he was 31.) He continued, " Because I know, I've seen behind the curtain, I've seen the business model, I know how this operation is executed and how it works."" I don't want to be part of this."

Regarding the documentary series, of which the first three parts were released last Thursday and the last three parts will air this coming Thursday, Harry apparently has "no regrets at all" and is "happy" with the first half of the series. The Mirror also reports that Harry wants Prince Charles and Prince William to watch the show "so that they can fully understand the anguish he and Meghan have faced," according to sources.

"Harry is delighted with the documentary's narrative and how he and Meghan have appeared," says a source who is a close friend of Harry's late mother, Princess Diana. 'His reason for making this documentary was to share the truth about their lives. He feels he was able to tell the story he wanted the world to hear and has no regrets at all."[15