Meghan Markle Accused of Misleading Photograph in Netflix Documentary
Meghan Markle has been accused in a viral TikTok post of misleadingly presenting a photo of herself preparing fish as though it was taken on the night she first met Prince William and Princess Kate.
However, while evidence suggests the image predates Meghan’s relationship with Prince Harry, there is no evidence Meghan or Netflix ever claimed it was taken during that dinner.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex gave a Netflix documentary team access to their private photo albums and mobile phone videos for the December 2022 biopic Harry & Meghan.
An image of Meghan dressed casually in a baseball cap and gray vest was displayed during episode two of the show as she spoke about having William and Kate over for dinner at the couple’s former Kensington Palace home, Nottingham Cottage.
While it was displayed as she discussed that night, the image was not explicitly identified in the documentary as being from the dinner.
Why It Matters
Claims about the accuracy of Harry & Meghan continue to generate scrutiny on social media, where individual clips are often reexamined and circulated independent of their original context.
On this occasion, the criticism was made in a TikTok post that went viral after it was viewed 1.7 million times and liked 26,700 times. The post itself, however, makes a factually unsupported claim.
What the Post Got Right
The TikTok post began with a still image of Meghan in a blue and white Toronto Blue Jays cap and gray vest, leaning over a chopping board where she appears to be preparing fresh fish.
An onscreen caption read: “This is the photo Meghan gave Netflix showing the night she cooked fish tacos for her first meeting with William and Catherine.”
There is no evidence indicating Meghan told the Netflix production team that the image was from that dinner.
The clip then cuts to a black screen with the words “there’s only one problem,” before the video cuts again to show a screenshot of Meghan’s old, since deleted, Instagram account. She now has a new one.
The date was highlighted, appearing to show she posted it in 2013, three years before she met Harry and four years before her first meeting with William and Kate.
Meghan deleted her original Instagram in 2018, shortly before marrying Prince Harry so Newsweek has not been able to recover the original.
However, the same Instagram screenshot did appear on the website of Canadian lifestyle magazine Chatelaine in April 2018. The image included the social media post’s August 10, 2013, publication date. Meghan’s post had the caption: “Sea bream. Boom.”
The TikTok video appears to be correct about the history of the image, but that is only half the story. Equally important to the argument being put forward is the way the image was presented in the show.
How the Photo Was Presented in Harry & Meghan
The photo was shown during a segment of the documentary in which Harry and Meghan spoke about the early days of their relationship.
“It’s so funny if I look back at it now because now I know so much and I’m so glad I didn’t then because I could just authentically be myself without so much preparedness,” Meghan said.
“Even when Will and Kate came over and I had met her for the first time, they came over for dinner, I remember I was in ripped jeans and I was barefoot…”
The photo was then displayed on screen before Meghan continued: “Like, I was a hugger, always been a hugger. I didn’t realize that that is really jarring for a lot of Brits. I guess I’d started to understand very quickly that the formality on the outside carried through on the inside.”
The image does not appear in full, and is cropped to remove the fish. Meghan does not say she made fish tacos for William and Kate.
Analysis
It is not clear why the TikTok post references Meghan cooking fish tacos. Newsweek has not been able to find any reference to this being the dish Meghan cooked for William and Kate.
The show’s editors likely used the photo more to show Meghan dressed casually than because of the dish, as it appears just after she says she wore ripped jeans and was barefoot.
Some viewers might wrongly interpret the photo as an image from the night in question, however, it is also worth noting that it is not presented as evidence of any particular point the couple were making, controversial or otherwise.
No one has disputed Meghan’s account that she was dressed casually and there is nothing to suggest Meghan told the production team at Story Syndicate it was from the night she first met William and Kate.
In Harry’s book, Spare, he simply wrote: “We'd had them over for dinner during one of Meg's visits, and Meg cooked, and everything was good.”
Other Issues With Harry & Meghan
The documentary has faced other criticism over how some events were presented.
In September 2023, Newsweek examined Harry’s account of the moment Meghan concluded tensions within the royal family were driven by jealousy of her.
Harry said the “penny dropped” for his wife after she knocked all the other royals off the front page of The Sunday Telegraph. That edition was published in November 2019 while appearing in a section of the documentary discussing events from 2018.
What the show did not make clear is that the Telegraph cover could not have triggered a rift that had started a year earlier and was in fact by that point so established that Harry had acknowledged it publicly during an ITV documentary in October 2019. The prince told Harry & Meghan: An African Journey that he and William were on different paths.
By comparison, the brief use of a photo of Meghan in a vest and Blue Jays cap does not carry the weight of any of Meghan and Harry’s substantive criticisms of the royals or media.
Viewers are free to form their own conclusions about whether it was misused, but it does not undermine the argument put forward in the documentary and there is no evidence Meghan told Netflix it was anything other than a photo of herself wearing casual clothes.
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This story was originally published June 9, 2026 at 4:51 AM.