What Prince Harry and Meghan royal rift timeline reveals about their story

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle‘s rift with Prince William played a key role in their royal exit, and a timeline shows just how early the problems started.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have given varying accounts of the key moment when everything went wrong during the two years they worked side by side as working royals. Harry told Oprah Winfrey a tour of Australia and the South Pacific was the turning point, while Meghan cited a story in the British press saying she made Kate Middleton cry.

The prince also made much of a separate story the following month, which nicknamed Meghan “Duchess Difficult.”

Meanwhile, staff at Kensington Palace accused Meghan of bullying, and a friend of William’s told a biographer the situation got so bad that William threw Harry out of their shared private office.

Here are the facts and claims as they unfolded, month by month.

Timeline of the Royal Rift

Fall 2016: Harry tells William and Kate his new girlfriend is from the American TV series Suits. William and Kate turn out to be fans. In October, she meets Queen Elizabeth for the first time, followed by William, whom she hugged, “which completely freaked him out,” according to Harry’s memoir, Spare. The meeting went well, however, and William’s verdict was “Happy for you, Harold.”

October/November 2016: Harry and Meghan’s relationship becomes public after a story in the Sunday Express. After a tidal wave of stories, Jason Knauf, Kensington Palace communications secretary, releases a statement on Harry’s behalf denouncing “a wave of abuse and harassment.”

November 2017: Prince Harry and Meghan get engaged. The British media greets the news with rapturous praise for the couple.

May 2018: Meghan and Kate clash over Princess Charlotte‘s bridesmaid’s dress. Meghan also offends Kate by suggesting she may have baby brain, having recently given birth to Prince Louis.

June 2018: After the wedding, Harry, Meghan, William and Kate hold clear-the-air talks. William says Meghan’s baby brain comment was “rude,” while Meghan replies: “Kindly take your finger out of my face,” according to Spare.

Summer 2018: The atmosphere at Kensington Palace where the four royals are based has become “poisoned” by rivalry, with staffers picking sides. Harry writes that constructive criticism has become impossible, feedback was received as an “insult” and “more than once a staff member slumped across their desk and wept.” William blames Meghan, while Harry blames staff William brought in from the government.

August 2018: Meghan writes a text message to Knauf stating that Harry’s family was “constantly berating” him about her father’s interviews in the media. She sends a letter to Thomas Markle begging him to stop on the advice of the queen and Prince Charles.

October 2018: Harry and Meghan begin a tour of Australia and the South Pacific, where they announce Meghan is pregnant with their first child. The prince would later tell Winfrey this was the moment when everything changed: “My father, my brother, Kate and all the rest of the family, they were really welcoming. But it really changed after the Australia tour.”

In Spare, he wrote: “She was so brilliant that midway through the tour I felt compelled…to warn her. You’re doing too well, my love. Too damn well. You’re making it look too easy. This is how everything started…with my mother.”

On their return, a biography of Charles by Robert Jobson suggests Harry had told staff before the wedding: “What Meghan wants, she gets.”

Knauf private emails Prince William’s private secretary, Simon Case, to accuse Meghan of bullying two personal assistants out of the royal household. The message is leaked to the media but not until March 2021 and days before the couple’s Winfrey interview.

November 2018: More stories appear in the U.K. press painting Meghan as demanding. The first, in The Sun, had a headline that read: “The Queen warned Prince Harry over Meghan Markle’s ‘difficult’ behaviour after row over bride’s tiara for royal wedding.”

It then emerges that Harry and Meghan are moving out of Kensington Palace, where they had an “apartment” alongside William and Kate’s.

Days later, The Daily Telegraph reports the now famous story that Meghan made Kate cry during an argument over bridesmaid dresses, which was followed up on the front page of The Sun. Meghan would later tell Winfrey it was her, rather than Kate, who cried.

The duchess said: “That was a turning point.” And Harry wrote in Spare that the detail leaked after William told Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles a month before about “strife between the two couples.” While the argument was real, Kate accepted that she made Meghan cry, according to Harry.

December 2018: U.K. broadsheet The Times reports that Meghan’s staff found her difficult to work for, with a headline writer giving her the nickname “Duchess Difficult.” In Spare, Harry disputed this story and wrote: “In many ways that was the true start of all the troubles.”

January 2019: Meghan told Winfrey she experienced suicidal thoughts while pregnant and told Harry about it for the first time on the day they visited London’s Royal Albert Hall for a performance by Cirque du Soleil on January 16, 2019. She said: “I just didn’t want to be alive anymore. And that was a very clear and real and frightening constant thought.”

February 2019: People publishes an anonymous interview with five of Meghan’s friends defending her. The friends reference the letter she sent Thomas Markle, who then hands it to The Mail on Sunday.

Around this time, William confronts Harry about Meghan, saying, “She’s rude. She’s abrasive. She’s alienated half the staff.” Harry wrote in Spare: “He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor. I landed on the dog’s bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me. I lay there for a moment, dazed, then got to my feet and told him to get out.”

March 2019: The royals announce Harry and Meghan will leave the private office they shared with William and Kate at Kensington Palace and have their own team of staffers overseen by Buckingham Palace. A friend of William’s would later tell biographer Robert Lacey that William “threw Harry out.” Lacey wrote: “He certainly wanted Meghan removed, for a start, from the hitherto harmonious joint household that he and his brother had operated together for the best part of a decade. William simply did not want her or Harry around anymore.”

May 2019: Harry and Meghan’s Prince Archie is born.

September/October 2019: Meghan and Harry announce three lawsuits against the U.K. media, including a privacy and copyright case brought by the duchess against The Mail on Sunday over the letter to her father.

November 2019: An ITV documentary shows Markle telling journalist and friend of the royals Tom Bradby that she is not “OK” during an interview on a royal tour of South Africa. Harry acknowledges his rift with William for the first time in the film.

Meghan and Harry leave Britain to spend Thanksgiving in Canada. They stay until the new year.

January 2020: Harry and Meghan’s plans to quit Britain for a new life in America leak to The Sun. The details of their exit are thrashed out at the Sandringham Summit, where Harry says William “looked at me as if he planned to murder me.”

March 2020: Harry and Meghan complete their final royal jobs, including at the Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey, before beginning their new lives in America.

July 2020: Meghan has a miscarriage. Harry will later say he believes it was caused by anxiety arising from the lawsuit against The Mail on Sunday, though some experts say stress is not associated with an increased risk of miscarriage.

Her lawyers tell London’s High Court that while at Kensington Palace she was left “pregnant, unprotected by the institution and prohibited from defending herself.”

September-December 2020: A “senior member of the royal household” meets the editor of The Mail on Sunday offering “high-grade” information, including that Knauf had worked on Meghan’s letter to her father. The newspaper would go on to use this information against Meghan in the lawsuit.

February 2021: Meghan and Harry are stripped of their honorary military titles and patronages by Queen Elizabeth.

March 2021: As Meghan and Harry’s Winfrey interview approaches, The Times publishes allegations that Meghan bullied her staff, which the duchess denies. The report is based on an email sent by Knauf to an aide to William suggesting Meghan forced the two personal assistants out of the household.

Meghan tells Winfrey about her suicidal thoughts and that an unnamed royal expressed “concerns” about how dark her unborn child’s skin might be. She says this happened during her pregnancy, while Harry says it happened “right at the beginning.”

April 2021: Prince Philip dies, and Harry returns to Britain for the funeral.

May 2021: Harry’s royal bombshells continue with an appearance on the Armchair Expert podcast in which he suggests he experienced “genetic pain.” On a mental health documentary for Apple TV, he accuses his family of “total neglect” over his battle with the media.

June 2021: Princess Lilibet is born to Meghan and Harry.

November 2021: Meghan’s private emails and text messages are released to the media via her lawsuit against The Mail on Sunday after Knauf, the former palace communications secretary, hands them to the High Court.

April 2022: Harry avoids a question from the Today show’s Hoda Kotb about whether he misses his brother and father while saying he wants to make sure the queen was “protected” and had the right people around her.

September 2022: Queen Elizabeth dies. Harry and Meghan appear in public alongside William and Kate greeting well-wishers at Windsor Castle before all four attend Elizabeth’s funeral.

December 2022: The six-part Netflix documentary Harry & Meghan offers the couple’s criticisms of the royal family.

January 2023: Spare is released, with sweeping allegations against William, Kate and other royal family members.

May 2023: Harry attends King Charles’s coronation without Meghan and heads to the airport before the day’s events finish. The service was on Archie’s birthday.

Jack Royston is chief royal correspondent for Newsweek, based in London. You can find him on Twitter at @jack_royston and read his stories on Newsweek‘s The Royals Facebook page.

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