‘Onslaught’: Hollywood deserts Meghan Markle
The Duchess of Sussex has been hit by wave after wave of blistering reports – and her mega agent and A-list friends have vanished.
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Gather round, all you aspiring true crime podcasters.
I’ve got the perfect mystery worthy of a 12-part series deserving of one of those big whiteboards covered in red string. It has all the necessary ingredients: A tragic heroine, swirling forces and a tale of so much promise dashed.
At the heart of this unsolved case: How did Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex go from being so in demand and such scorchingly hot property that Netflix turned up with a nine-figure deal to having vultures circling and Hollywood seemingly having abandoned her?
For six weeks now, the duchess has faced a series of devastating take downs with her mega agent nowhere to be seen and her A-list pals failing to rally to her defence.
No man is an island, but the duchess is looking increasingly forsaken and stranded on an atoll of one.
This week, the latest such barrage came from one of the biggest names in American media, famed former Vanity Fair and New Yorkereditor Tina Brown.
Speaking to The Ankler podcast, Brown let loose about the duchess, saying “all of her ideas are total c**p”, “she’s flawless about getting it all wrong” and “she made every mistake in the book, and she’s kind of run out of road”.
Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex meanwhile, is “in the thrall of Meghan … He’s the lamb to the slaughter … he just sort of blindly followed her like a child”.
Brown’s onslaught is just the latest indicator of a certain wind change in Hollywood around Brand Sussex with the floodgates having opened last month, leaving the duchess looking more and more exposed and isolated.
First, the Hollywood Reporter published a piece based on interviews with 12 current and former staffers, reviving claims of a “Sussex Survivors Club” with sources saying that she is “just terrible” and that “everyone’s terrified of Meghan”.
“She’s absolutely relentless. She marches around like a dictator in high heels, fuming and barking orders. I’ve watched her reduce grown men to tears,” a source recounted.
Hot on the heels of that came other former staffers telling the Daily Beast’s Tom Sykes that she was a “demon” who had “psycho moments” as a boss, followed by, yes, another blistering article.
A senior Hollywood figure told the Daily Mail’s Alison Boshoff, that the Sussexes were experiencing “schadenfreude with extra venom” and that “It’s hard to find anyone with a good word to say for their film and television credibility”.
The reaction to all of this?
No knights in shining armour have arrived. No steeds have been gallantly galloped into the fray on Meghan’s behalf, despite her supposedly having some of the best representation in the business.
In April last year, Ari Emanuel’s WME agency, the creme de la creme of Hollywood powerhouses, grandly announced with much fanfare that it had signed the duchess, bringing with it the promise of fatted calf commercial deals.
WME was “honoured” to represent her “in all areas”, it posted on X at the time. The focus would be “on building out her business ventures … including film and television production, brand partnerships, and more”.
Despite this, WME has failed to, as far as has been reported, fire fight in any meaningful way during this recent barrage.
Moreover, the fruit borne of Meghan’s union with WME barely amounts to a desiccated craisin’s worth. There has not been a single new successfully launched business venture or a brand partnership, let alone any of the elusive “more”.
The duchess has not inked a single new major deal in that time, aside from joining the books of podcasting company Lemonada Media, not that that pairing has seen anything eventuate.
But hey, the market and other economic terms. The-post pandemic budgetary correction has not spared even the titled.
Still, as Meghan told The Cut in 2022, “the silent part is still part of the song”. The “silent
part” right now is coming across increasingly loudly, with those with industry clout having conspicuously failed in any way to rally for her cause or to come to her defence.
There’s Emanuel and WME, whose reaction has been limper than an uncooked sausage.
As Boshoff in the Mail noted, the “Hollywood Reporter article was just the kind of unflattering ‘hit piece’ which you might expect the talent agency WME to have strangled at birth for their client, Meghan”. A senior Hollywood publicist told Boshoff, “It’s really striking that WME did not stop this running”.
The duchess did not attend WME’s glittering recent post-Emmy’s party, either.
Or what of the biggest Sussex booster of them all? Oprah Winfrey happily promoted Clevr Brands, of which Meghan is an investor, in the months before the Sussexes handed her the biggest interview of the 21st century so far – and yet she has remained silent.
So too Meghan’s other big name friends, such as Serena Williams and even her former Suits co-stars, usually good for a supportive quote, who have all been on mute. Ellen DeGeneres, who had the Sussexes at her vow renewal with wife Portia DeRossi in 2023 and the duchess on her eponymous talk show, has not done any of her signature talking in support of her Montecito neighbour.
All that early Sussex promise of 2020 and 2021, when the Duke and Duchess were being feted by TIME as some of the 100 most influential people in the world, has evaporated faster than spilt milk in the midday California sun.
At the recent Children's Hospital of Los Angeles gala, Meghan walked the red carpet but reportedly only stayed for two awards. None of the other celebrity attendees at the event such as Jamie Lee Curtis, Kaley Cuoco or Jimmy Kimmel and his wife Molly McNearney were seen with her.
In July, Meghan and her Montecito neighbour Jamie Kern Lima flew via Lima’s private jet to the G9 Ventures Summit in the Hamptons. Stars-turned-major-entrepreneurs like Gwyneth Paltrow and Reese Witherspoon and media heavyweight Diane Sawyer did not pose for any chummy Instagram snappety snaps with the duchess.
It gets worse. Page Six reported of the Summit that celebrities “did their best to dodge being caught in photographs with Meghan Markle”, while an insider told NewsNation’s Paula Froelich of A-listers like Paltrow, “Meghan can show up at events where they are at, move into their neighbourhood but they are not friends”.
Last year, Meghan attended the LA leg of Beyonce’s Renaissance tour and was photographed mingling with Jeff Bezos and his fiancee Lauren Sanchez, Kris Jenner, Kerry Washington, Kelly Rowland and Netflix supremo Ted Sarandos. None of these chummy scenes have been repeated this year.
Then there is the Lindbergh baby of the Sussex story, which is Meghan’s lifestyle brand American Riviera Orchard (ARO), announced with some twee Insta schmaltziness back in March. Seven months on, not a single pot of anything sticky or sweet is available for purchase, and nor is there a website beyond a bare bones landing page or even a mooted launch date.
The only headlines ARO has made are for coming up against the stern sorts at the US Patent and Trademark Office who knocked back her trademark application last month.
As we straggle towards the finish line of 2024, the Sussex brand has never looked more deflated, all the air, all the promise, all the fizz having long gone out of it.
In the US, in the last two and a bit years we have seen – beyond The Hollywood Reporter and The Daily Beast – The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and New York Magazine’s The Cut publish pieces with unflattering claims about the Sussexes, their high staff turnover and their attempts to make it Stateside. It’s impossible to write this all off, as they have with other reporting, as the work of the toxic British press.
Just to really provoke a mind-melting case of whiplash, consider that only five years ago, Meghan and Harry were still in the royal family and there was talk of them tootling off to Canada for a wee rest.
When it comes to the Sussexes, I feel like some law of the fourth dimension of time has been bent and we have not yet quite realised it, for so much to have happened and changed and flipped and been rewritten so fast.
Einstein cracked the law of relativity. Has Meghan just discovered the inverse of the law of relevance?
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles
Originally published as ‘Onslaught’: Hollywood deserts Meghan Markle
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