Meghan Markle, Harry Lied About Having No Plan Before Megxit? Couple 'Held Talks' With Company: Report

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry were in talks with former Netflix and YouTube rival Quibi before "Megxit," a report says, despite their claims that they had no plan before they quit royal duties last year.

In their bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey last month, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex said the royal family cut them off financially, and they only managed to move to California thanks to his inheritance from Princess Diana as they had no backup plan when they decided to step back as working royals.

However, royal correspondent Camilla Tominey reported, citing unnamed insiders, that before they signed deals with Netflix and Spotify last year, they had been in discussions for projects with Quibi, a now-defunct video streaming service, since early 2019—a year before they announced their royal exit.

“There were well-developed proposals in place with Quibi from early 2019,” an unnamed source with knowledge about the matter told The Telegraph. “A lot of it was orchestrated by Meghan’s people in America. It was a bit of a secret squirrel.”

Several unnamed sources from the U.K. and U.S. also said that the couple had numerous conversations with Quibi, including its founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was described as “one of Hollywood’s premier political kingmakers,” and CEO Meg Whitman, a former president of eBay, the report said.

Quibi drew up a proposal, and there were conference calls about Prince Harry and Markle’s potential 10-minute videos, according to the report. Prince Harry also reportedly attended a meeting in London with the new executive director of Archewell in London last January.

However, after the Duke and Duchess of Sussex moved to Los Angeles and the pandemic put all their plans on hold, they signed a multimillion-dollar production deal with Netflix in September 2020.

At the time, Quibi, which had aimed at changing how people consume videos on mobile devices, was already on the verge of shutting down. The streaming service collapsed in October 2020, just six months after it was launched, Los Angeles Times reported.

Palace aides were concerned that due to their discussions with Quibi, Markle and Prince Harry would be accused of cashing in on their royal status, the report claimed.

“It was hard for royal aides to be supportive of projects like Quibi because they knew how it might look but the couple kept dismissing these concerns. They didn’t seem to see the pitfalls of any potential conflict of interests,” one unnamed source told The Telegraph.

Last month, Prince Harry told Winfrey that they "did not have a plan" when they made the decision to leave their royal life and move to the U.S.

"The Netflix and the Spotify, they're all... that was never part of the plan," he said.

"Because you didn't have a plan?" prompted Winfrey. "We didn't have a plan," replied Markle.

"We didn't have a plan," Prince Harry added. "That was suggested by somebody else by the point of where my family literally cut me off financially, and I had to afford . . . afford security for us."

Aside from their Netflix and Spotify projects, Prince Harry is set to join San Francisco-based health tech company BetterUp Inc., which offers professional and mental health coaching, as its new chief impact officer, his spokesperson confirmed to NBC News last week.