Exclusive extract from new Meghan Markle biography, Meghan Misunderstood, by Sean Smith
The Duchess of Sussex was a victim to severe racism, according to a bombshell biography, which explains how her royal life took a wrong turn. READ THE EXTRACT
Entertainment
Don't miss out on the headlines from Entertainment. Followed categories will be added to My News.
A familiar narrative casting Meghan Markle as an unsuitable upstart whose arrival split the royal family is challenged in a new book by leading biographer SEAN SMITH. Meghan Misunderstood argues that racist UK media stuck the boot in from the moment she met Prince Harry, while overlooking her humanitarian achievements. This exclusive edited extract reveals the hounding worsened in pregnancy — and shows how Palace leaks set up the new Duchess of Sussex against her sister-in-law Princess Kate.
Meghan was thirty-seven and expecting her first child with the eyes of the world upon her. After making such a success of her first official tour — to Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and
Tonga — and dealing with important and serious issues, in particular women’s rights, you might have expected the media to be a little respectful or at least kind to her during the final few months of her pregnancy.
Instead, she was greeted by a flurry of negative articles about the cradling of her baby bump. Jo Elvin, the editor of You Magazine — the supplement of the Mail on Sunday — caught the
tone: ‘This is the Duchess of Showbiz we have here. It smacks to me of a focus that’s contrived and relentlessly photo-op ready. Meghan would be well advised to take the “world’s only pregnant woman” vibe down a notch or two.’
The Daily Mail had more to say on the matter. Liz Jones wrote, ‘Personally, I find the cradling a bit like those signs in the back of cars: Baby on Board. Virtue signalling, as though the rest of us barren harridans deserve to burn alive in our cars.’
Such rants about a pregnant woman stroking or holding her baby bump only encouraged far worse online responses from trolls on social media.
The problem for Meghan was that she couldn’t give the metaphorical finger to the columnists or internet aggressors. Khloe Kardashian, of the much-derided but highly successful American clan, was a good example of how to combat that bullying. She tweeted while pregnant earlier in the year: ‘People are very opinionated about my bump. I choose to cradle my bump because it’s mine. I’ve waited for this very short moment for years. I have only months to enjoy this phase in my life, so I will touch my bump and love my bump as often as I choose.’
Aside from the obvious bullying of a pregnant woman, it began to dawn on people that Meghan was being treated entirely differently to Kate Middleton. When Kate was expecting and pictured with her hand on her stomach in early 2018, the Daily Mail exclaimed, ‘Bumping along nicely!’ as the Duchess of Cambridge ‘tenderly cradled’ her bump.
According to the tabloids, Meghan was not allowed to behave normally because of protocol
— one of the most overused words when talking about the Royal Family. It is a nonsense term that is trotted out to give some footling story gravitas.
Apparently Meghan had already breached protocol countless times. She had, for instance, worn a dress with an off -the-shoulder neckline to the Trooping of the Colour ceremony.
Then she wore a dark nail polish on her toes to the British Fashion Awards. Most heinous of all, she had shut her own car door when arriving for an event at the Royal Academy of Arts.
One day she was celebrating female suffrage — the next she was being criticised for shutting her own car door.
The CNN Royal Commentator Victoria Arbiter was scathing about the stories: ‘Nail polish has NOTHING to do with protocol. Nor do tights, car doors or messy buns. This is WRONG.
Enough with this nonsense.’
The Daily Mail was not finished with pregnant Meghan. She had committed yet another faux pas by serving avocado on toast to a friend, makeup artist Daniel Martin, visiting from LA. The headline set the tone: ‘Is Meghan’s favourite snack fuelling drought and murder?’ The hard-hitting story from Tom Leonard in New York said that the production of Meghan’s tasty treat was linked to water shortages, human rights abuses and general environmental devastation — and was even filling the coffers of brutal drug cartels.
The best satirists in the land would have been hard-pressed to come up with a storyline of using avocados to bash Meghan.
She also had to contend with a steady drip of information from Palace circles — all of it seemed to be positive about Kate while negative about Meghan. One was a safe, sporty and slim Home Counties woman and the other, an upstart, bi-racial, American divorcee. The former embraced royal protocol while the latter broke the rules.
Kate had a very brief CV before she became a Royal bride. That was not entirely her fault. She had been William’s girlfriend for very nearly ten years before they married in a ceremony full of pomp and tradition in 2011. That was practically a full-time job in itself.
She had stuck it out, even when the press mocked her as ‘Waity Katy’. She worked for a year as a junior buyer for Jigsaw, the high-street fashion chain, but struggled with the attention.
On her twenty-fifth birthday she was surrounded by paparazzi as she left her Chelsea flat to go to work. Clarence House issued a statement that William was very unhappy about the ‘intolerable’ harassment of his girlfriend. His tone was remarkably similar to the one adopted by Harry when he defended Meghan against media intrusion.
Kate had always got on famously well with Harry. She did have, however, previous form where the significant others of her brother-in-law were concerned. Her relationship with Chelsy Davy had been at best cordial and at worst frosty. One of Chelsy’s friends from South Africa had observed, ‘She is a force of nature and doesn’t have time for Kate. She finds her
boring.’ It was also reported that Kate was not that keen on Cressida Bonas either.
That was all in the past, but it appeared that in the present she was not welcoming Meghan with open arms and helping her sister-in-law to negotiate her new world. From the very beginning, the stories were very one-sided — this was not necessarily Kate’s fault, but someone from the Royal Household was leaking negative stories about Meghan.
When Meghan asked for scent to be sprayed around the chapel before her wedding, the Daily Mail weighed in: ‘Kicking Up a Stink: “Dictatorial” bride Meghan wanted air fresheners for musty 15th-century St George’s Chapel … but the Palace said no!’
How did the newspaper know this? An unnamed member of the Royal Household staff explained helpfully: ‘I don’t believe a request of that nature had been made before.’ It had, though. The Daily Mail had reported just before Kate’s wedding that she had requested her ‘favourite scented candles and toiletries from luxury fragrance brand Jo Malone to be delivered to Westminster Abbey’.
It was just one of many stories unfavourably comparing the two duchesses. Online research revealed twenty such headlines. And then there was the totally uncorroborated story that
Meghan had made Kate cry over the issue of bridesmaids’ tights on her wedding day. Again, how did we hear about this unless various unnamed people were briefing against Meghan?
Apparently Meghan was nicknamed Duchess Difficult by staff upset at being woken at 5.30am by an enthusiastic employer wanting to get on with things. This was a woman well used to getting up at 4.30am for a day’s filming. She had a Californian work ethic that the ‘men in grey suits’, as Diana called them, disliked as it upset their routines.
The leaks, it seemed, were endless. A royal source is never named, nor is a courtier, a member of the Palace staff or an aide. If a particular strong point is being made, stick the word senior in front of the ‘source’, then quote what you like to back up the story. We, the readers, are never informed if a deal has been struck, financial or otherwise, in return for the information.
And Meghan could not respond. Suzanne Moore in the Guardian described the way in which Meghan was being scrutinised as ‘shameful’. She observed, ‘All the tabloid fixation with her pregnancy reminds us that she has entered an abusive relationship — in which misogyny is so ramped up that whatever she does is somehow suspect.’
At least Meghan’s baby shower was a happy event, held away from prying eyes in The Mark Hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The party had been organised by Serena Williams and Meghan’s old friend Genevieve Hillis.
The negative coverage this time focused on the extravagance and the cost of the weekend, rumoured ludicrously to be $300,000, and the fact that she had been treated to a flight on a
private jet by the Clooneys.
From the moment Harry made his speech in Fiji about climate change, stating that there ‘cannot be any more excuses’ when it comes to protecting the planet, both he and Meghan
were sitting targets for cries of hypocrisy every time they parked the pushbike and took a plane. It was another stick with which to beat them; continually shooting the messenger does not mean the message is wrong.
Piers Morgan, previously such a supporter of Meghan, was certainly one columnist who would be shouting hypocrisy in the future to justify his endless negativity about Meghan. He exclusively told the Sunday People that he had been friendly with her but she had ‘ghosted’ him: ‘She is someone I thought I was pretty matey with and “bang”, she met somebody more important and that was it.’
Piers was in LA to drum up some publicity for Good Morning Britain’s live show from the Oscars — and Meghan guaranteed that.
Meghan and Piers were not friends or remotely matey. They exchanged a few emails and she met him once in a pub. He was a useful contact but it was nothing more than networking in a business where that was commonplace and important if you wanted to get ahead.
‘QUITE RUDE’: How Morgan recalls Markle meeting
The problem for Meghan was that a negative story about her was going to gather more attention than a positive one. It was a simple fact of life in the modern online world. Her ‘inner circle’ did their best to help stem the tide against her. Five of them gave a positive interview to People Magazine in the US, a course of action that would prove controversial in the future.
One, described as a co-star, observed, ‘Meg has sat silently back and endured all the lies and untruths. We worry about what this is doing to her and the baby. It’s wrong to put anyone under this level of emotional trauma, let alone when they’re pregnant.
George Clooney added his support. He compared Meghan’s treatment to previous dark times: ‘She’s a woman who is seven months pregnant and she has been pursued and vilified and chased in the same way that Diana was and it’s history repeating itself. We’ve seen how that ends.’
Meghan couldn’t defend herself because the Royal Family never did that sort of thing. Only Harry tried to defend his wife, as he had done right from the start. Kate and William were never going to come to her defence — the gang of four had, we were about to discover, been an idealistic newspaper headline. The reality was very much two separate gangs of two.
***
Meghan gave birth to a son at 5.26am on 6 May 2019, at the Portland Hospital near Regent’s Park, London. It had been a long night. Two days later, Meghan and Harry presented their son to the world in the draughty old St George’s Hall at Windsor Castle.
They didn’t announce their son’s name then. That would be a couple of hours later on the Sussex Royal Instagram, which had close to eleven million followers. They posted a picture of their baby being introduced to the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. Meghan held him in her arms while Harry and Doria looked on. The delight on the Queen’s face as she met her eighth great-grandchild painted a thousand words.
His name: Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor. Harry and Meghan decided not to give him an official royal title. Harrison obviously signified Harry’s son. But Archie was a change from the more traditional old-fashioned royal choices. It meant genuine and bold. His arrival would prove to be a turning point for his parents.
This is an edited extract from Meghan Misunderstood by Sean Smith, published by HarperCollins Australia and available from Wednesday 18 November in all good bookstores and online.
MORE NEWS
Hollywood’s role in Meghan’s first break-up
Harry, Meghan visit Aussie grave as royal rift deepens
Why Crown star backs Harry and Meghan
Originally published as Exclusive extract from new Meghan Markle biography, Meghan Misunderstood, by Sean Smith
Join the conversation
Reality star dead at 34 after horror crash
“Adventurous soul” Sarah Danser has passed away days after being involved in a horror car accident.
Read more
Pop star takes dramatic mid-show tumble
US megastar Billie Eilish has suffered an embarrassing mid-performance fall during her sold-out tour.
Read more