Thelife- Meghan Markle's mother, Doria Ragland, appears in the Netflix docuseries "Harry & Meghan."
- She criticized Meghan's father Thomas Markle over reportedly staging paparazzi photos.
Meghan Markle's mother, Doria Ragland, spoke out against her ex-husband's paparazzi controversy in Netflix's "Harry & Meghan."
On Thursday, Netflix released Volume I of the docuseries about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's relationship and experience as senior members of the royal family.
In episode three, Meghan, Harry, and Ragland discussed Thomas Markle, Meghan's father, who accepted money to pose for paparazzi photos in May 2018 ahead of the couple's wedding, according to a Daily Mail report at the time.
Ragland said she was "absolutely stunned that Tom would become part of this circus."
"I felt sad that the media would run with this," she said. "That he would capitalize. Certainly as a parent it's not… that's not what you do. That's not parenting."
Ragland and Thomas were married from 1979 to 1987, divorcing when Meghan was 6, according to Us Weekly.
"It's amazing what people will do when offered a huge amount of money," Harry said in the docuseries. "Fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, to hand over photographs, to create a story."
In episode three of the series, Harry and Meghan spoke about how they addressed the photo controversy in the lead-up to their wedding. They said they learned from their communications team that TMZ would be publishing a story the next day saying that Thomas posed for photos.
Meghan said she called her father to ask him if the story was true, and Thomas denied the allegations. According to Meghan, Thomas refused her and Harry's help to get him out of Mexico, where he was living, before the media began swarming his house.
"I was like, 'We'll just come and get you a day early, we'll get you out of Mexico.' And he said, 'No, no, I have things to do.' And it felt really cagey," Meghan said. "I was like, 'It doesn't make sense.' And when we hung up, I looked at H and I was like, 'I don't know why, but I don't believe him.'"
Meghan said she called her father more than 20 times as reports of the staged photos broke days before their wedding. But she said he never returned any of her calls.
Meghan learned he wasn't coming to the wedding and that he had a heart attack through the tabloids, she said in the series.
Meghan and Harry also said they feared that Thomas' phone had become "compromised" after they received a strange text from him. The purported text, shown in the series, read: "I've done nothing to hurt you Meghan, or anyone else I know nothing about 20 phone calls I'm sorry my heart attack is there any inconvenience for you [sic]."
"It was really weird, you know how people text right?" Meghan said of the text. "My dad used a lot of emojis and ellipses and dot, dot, dot, and this was just the opposite. And it called me Meghan. I was like, 'He's never called me Meghan any day I've lived on this planet.' Meg, all my friends call me Meg and my parents call me Meg."
Thomas did not immediately reply to Insider's request for comment.
As for Meghan's mother, Ragland said in the series that she has chosen not to engage with the paparazzi.
"I was being stalked by the paparazzi," Ragland said. "Once, I pulled over. And so [a photographer] pulled next to me, and he said, 'You know, I just was trying to get a story. You know you could get a lot of money for this.'"
"And I just looked at him and said, 'This is my child. I have nothing to say,'" she said of the interaction, shaking her head.
Volume II of "Harry & Meghan" premieres on December 15.