Meghan Markle claims she was FORCED to attend royal engagements after son Archie escaped fire
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Meghan Markle claimed in the first episode of her new podcast that she was forced to continue with engagements on a South Africa tour even though she was distraught and left in tears when her son Archie narrowly escaped a fire in his bedroom. Meghan opened up about the fire during the tour of South Africa in autumn 2019 during a conversation with Serena Williams in a podcast titled 'The Misconception of Ambition with Serena Williams'.
"There was this moment where I'm standing on a tree stump and I'm giving this speech to women and girls, and we finish the engagement, we get in the car and they say there's been a fire at the residence. What? There's been a fire in the baby's room," Meghan said while speaking in the podcast about the fire in South Africa in Archie's room. She added, "We came back. And, of course, as a mother, you go, 'Oh, my God, what?' Everyone's in tears, everyone's shaken. And what do we have to do? Go out and do another official engagement. I said, 'This doesn't make any sense.'"
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At the time, the Sussexes had dropped Archie off at the housing unit they were staying in soon after flying in for their official tour in 2019. The child's former nanny, Lauren, took him downstairs to get a snack when the heater in the nursery caught fire. "In that amount of time that she went downstairs, the heater in the nursery caught on fire. There was no smoke detector. Someone happened to just smell smoke down the hallway, went in, fire extinguished. He was supposed to be sleeping in there," Meghan said.
Meghan recalled how she wanted to tell people what had happened. "I was like, 'Can you just tell people what happened?' And so much, I think, optically, the focus ends up being on how it looks instead of how it feels," she said, stressing the need to understand "human moments behind the scenes".
She added, "We had to leave our baby...and even though we were being moved into another place afterward, we still had to leave him and go do another official engagement." "I couldn't have done that," Williams said in response. Meghan and Harry's South Africa tour took place in the autumn of 2019, which is just a few months before the two of them quit as senior working royals of the royal family.
According to Mercury News, during her Africa tour with and husband Prince Harry, Meghan opened up in an ITV documentary interview about the toll that royal life and then negative press attention had taken on her.