Extracts of the book were serialised in
The Times and
The Sunday Times in the weeks prior to its release.
Finding Freedom was released on 11 August 2020. The book subsequently topped bestseller lists in the United Kingdom and the United States, and sold more than 31,000 hardback copies after five days of being on sale.
Finding Freedom received mixed reviews from critics. The
New York Times wrote that while the book made "it easier to understand why the couple felt the need to exit the Firm" by laying out the media policy and competitive bureaucracy of the British royal family, "too much space" was dedicated to an effort to provide details for "record-correcting context". The book was noted for specifying intimate details such as "the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's text messages", a description of the Queen's private sitting room at
Buckingham Palace and providing conflicting details of the private relationship between the couple and the
Duke and
Duchess of Cambridge.
Finding Freedom was also criticised for the timing of its release, with
The Guardian stating that it wasn't the couple's fault that "their book has come out in the middle of a global pandemic, but it does underscore their occasional tone deafness in the latter half of the book."
Legal issues In October 2019, it was reported that Meghan's team had begun legal proceedings against
The Mail on Sunday and
MailOnline for privacy violations and copyright infringement regarding a letter to her father published by
Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL). The letter was mentioned in a section of
Finding Freedom that detailed the Duchess's relationship with her father. In January 2021,
The Mail on Sunday editor
Ted Verity said in a witness statement that he had been informed by a member of the royal household that Harry and Meghan's communications secretary Sara Latham had "assisted the authors of
Finding Freedom by performing a role that was essentially
fact-checking, to make sure the authors got nothing wrong." In November 2021, the couple's former communications secretary Jason Knauf gave a statement to the court following ANL's appeal against a judge's ruling that accused them of breaching Meghan's privacy. Knauf mentioned the Duchess of Sussex gave him briefing points to share with the biography's authors and added that the Duke of Sussex had welcomed the suggestion that they should conceal their involvement with the process of writing the book. Meghan subsequently apologised to the court for not remembering the emails earlier and stated she "had absolutely no wish or intention to mislead the defendant or the court", adding that the "extent of the information" Knauf shared with the book's authors was "unknown" to her. == References ==