Endgame, p.17
Endgame, page 17
“Meghan came in and did the work, but she wasn’t in awe of her surroundings. It was like taking on a new job, one that came as a prerequisite with her marriage to the person she was in love with,” said a close friend of the duchess. “She took it seriously, but the fact she wasn’t saying, ‘Wow, this is the greatest thing on earth’ made people feel like she wasn’t grateful, that she didn’t deserve what she had.” To some at the Palace, here was a woman of color who was allowed into an entitled, exceedingly white space, so how dare she not show an abundance of gratitude. The fact that later she would choose to step away from it, essentially rejecting the hallowed space she was “lucky” enough to have entered, emerged as the sore point for many.
In the weeks that followed their May 2018 nuptials, the couple embarked on a successful seventy-six-engagement tour of Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and Tonga. Their popularity grew so big that, according to several Palace staffers I have spoken to over the years, there was intense jealousy over the couple’s growing star power among senior courtiers and other family members. “It’s a tricky place to be when you’re sixth in line but up there with number one [the Queen] in terms of popularity,” one of the couple’s press secretaries told me that summer. “They’ll probably want to bring them down a peg.”
And so, the Palace permitted the press to do their bidding. A month after the couple returned to England, negative stories trickled out. “Kicking up a stink” was the Daily Mail’s November 30, 2018, headline, which reported on Meghan’s alleged “dictatorial” request to place air fresheners inside St. George’s Chapel before her wedding ceremony (of course, when Kate filled Westminster Abbey with Jo Malone for her wedding, it was “sweet”). Then the Telegraph reported the now well-worn story about Meghan making Kate cry at a bridesmaid fitting (which, not even three years later, we heard was actually the other way around). The same paper also used a report to claim a community kitchen Meghan was working with, run by a group of mostly Middle Eastern and North African women, was linked to terrorism—simply based on research carried out by an “anti-Islam” think tank that “suggested” the mosque it was housed in may have been attended by three terror criminals a decade prior. And there was The Sun’s reporting that Meghan rejected the wedding tiara the Queen offered because she preferred a different design. “What Meghan wants, Meghan gets!” Harry reportedly ranted to the monarch’s dresser, Angela Kelly. A fatuous and erroneous story from start to finish, but it had remarkable staying power in the press (again, never publicly denied by anyone in the Palace). A week later, the same outlet reported that an “angry” Meghan had “bollocked” a member of Kensington Palace staff. This was around the same time as a Telegraph story about the “garbage patch” Marks & Spencer tights she berated an assistant for buying instead of a pair from upmarket brand Wolford. Like most of these tales, this was not true. In fact, a bemused Kensington Palace staffer even showed me their text message exchange with Meghan, who had thanked them for rushing out to High Street Kensington to buy tights from M&S. As the only reporter close to the people working directly with the couple at the time, it was easy for me to see the manipulation for exactly what it was. As I was completely fine with calling it out, my daily reporting often differed from what was in the papers, which quickly put a target on my back, too.
This period was the birth of “Duchess Difficult”—one of the many nicknames given to Meghan by the Palace and tabloids over the years. “Me-gain” (because it’s all about “me,” a royal insider told society bible Tatler), “Narcissistic sociopath,” and “Degree wife” (this one supposedly by a senior royal because they felt her marriage would only last the length of a British university degree—three years) are a few others. Inside the Palace was no different to a school playground, except this time the bullies had reporters on speed dial.
For women of color, particularly those of African or Caribbean heritage, the trope of the difficult, angry, emotional woman is a familiar one. The repeated use of “Duchess Difficult” in tabloid reports is typical behavior by large sections of mainstream media, which often use divisive and inciting language—such as drama queen, diva, gold digger, aggressive, bully—to describe Black women, particularly those who have found success. Just ask the likes of Beyoncé, Michelle Obama, and Serena Williams, who have all been described in the press using similar terms over the years. These labels are why their life experiences, no matter how awful, are often met with little or no sympathy. “Calling someone the b-word, labeling them as difficult, it’s often a way to insult and dismiss someone,” Meghan explained in her 2022 Spotify podcast, Archetypes. “It becomes a way to take their power away, keep them in their place. A lot of times it’s tied to the very women who have power and agency.”
Palace officials had every opportunity to mitigate some of the attacks and defang some of the dog-whistling in the press, but instead they stayed silent. It was worse behind closed doors. Some aides and staff found the name-calling funny—a few even believed Meghan got what was coming to her. One former aide shared with me that a colleague told them Meghan “kind of deserved it . . . for making our lives hell” during the wedding planning. By “hell,” the former Palace employee explained, “they basically meant she had opinions. People didn’t like that. They wanted Meghan to just go with everything that was suggested and not create any additional work. It was a combination of her not conforming with how women marrying into the family are expected to behave and certain individuals just being lazy.”
The destructive symbiosis between the Palace and the press grew worse with time. Joining the growing list of negative stories about the duchess were new reports about issues with staff. The departure of Melissa Toubati, a Kensington Palace assistant for both of the Sussexes, was the first of many. A report in the Daily Mail in October 2018 revealed that the thirty-nine-year-old was leaving her post after just six months. It was accompanied by anonymous quotes (provided by a Kensington Palace aide), which told the paper, “Melissa is a hugely talented person. She played a pivotal role in the success of the Royal Wedding and will be missed by everyone in the Royal Household.” When later reports suggested that Meghan had reduced Toubati to “tears” and she’d been driven out of her job, Kensington Palace, including Jason Knauf, refused to comment to anyone on or off the record.
When I wrote in detail about the assistant’s departure in Finding Freedom, it was intriguing to see how quickly and thoroughly the Palace defended her, from the Palace’s positive briefings all the way to a call I received in March 2021 from a senior Buckingham Palace communications aide, after I reported details of the Sussexes’ side of the story on air. “Omid, I need you to remember that there is a human being at the other end of these claims,” they said. “Melissa has been very upset . . . Please remember that words have very real consequences.”
Words do indeed have consequences, but it felt slightly rich coming from the same institution that tacitly permitted cruel nicknames and did little to protect one of their own from a deluge of hateful and damaging reporting. As the racism and threats escalated, I was stunned by their inability to pick up the phone and ask the many journalists, “royal experts,” and columnists who were attacking Meghan what had been asked of me.
The pile-on took Meghan to a place she had never been before—contemplating suicide in early 2019. “I just didn’t want to be alive anymore,” she said. “That was a very clear and real and frightening constant thought.” But when she turned to the institution for help, potentially at a facility, she was told it would not be a good look for the Firm and was instead advised to lie low so the papers would give her a break. She responded that she’d left the house only twice in the previous four months.
Her supposedly “private” meeting with Samantha Carruthers, the Palace’s head of HR, surfaced as Palace gossip within a matter of weeks. Various staff at Kensington Palace, Clarence House, and Buckingham Palace all tittle-tattled about Meghan’s personal crisis, and the chatter even reached some of the reporters in the royal rota. There were few who were sympathetic, and even fewer who did or said anything to help. “The feeling was that she needed to develop a thicker skin,” a former Palace staffer recently told me.
The institutional response was regrettably predictable. Instead of lending a hand, they gave her the company line, requiring her to demonstrate some of that clichéd stiff upper lip and suffer in silence, all part of a compulsory effort to protect the company brand. The direction from the Palace was, “Don’t say anything,” Harry said in the Harry & Meghan docuseries. “As far as the family was concerned, everything she was put through, they were put through as well. Like, ‘My wife had to go through that, so why should your girlfriend be treated any differently, why should you get special treatment?’ And I said, ‘The difference here is the race element.’”
The Palace’s obvious indifference to Meghan’s predicament sent an undeniable message to people of color everywhere. Even a person of color like Meghan—an admittedly white-passing, and privileged biracial woman—is still subject to racial bias and gaslighting in a publicly funded institution that is globally celebrated by leaders and kingmakers. The royal establishment’s reluctance to speak out against the racism, or to at least protect a victim of it among their own ranks, indicates how retrograde thinking still poisons the heart of this often-revered family operation.
Contrary to ridiculous reports and endless internet gossip, Meghan and I didn’t know each other before she entered stage right into the royal family drama. Other than a brief red-carpet encounter at a fashion event in 2015 (one I doubt she would even remember), she knew as much about me as she did the rest of the royal press pack. Though I had enjoyed covering the royals for more than five years before Meghan’s arrival, the majority of my work was largely focused on the family’s philanthropic endeavors and picture-worthy milestones. I was an Us Weekly editor at the time, and the American appetite for glowing coverage of the House of Windsor’s younger members meant that I devoted acres of pages to William and Kate’s exciting new lives and Harry’s journey as a young royal. Given that I wanted to maintain strong access to their world and work, this approach suited me just fine. Back then, the royal family—alongside the Kardashians—were the outlet’s number one franchise for its millions of readers. It’s why at one point more than a quarter (all positive) of its fifty-two annual covers was dedicated to the royals. And Kensington Palace loved the arrangement, too, always helping me with reporting and even working closely on a number of standalone spin-off publications.
It was the arrival of Suits actress Meghan Markle that increased my personal interest in the next chapters of the royal story. Here was a smart, accomplished biracial American woman, every bit the confident, optimistic Californian, joining a thousand-year-old family of hereditary power and a staid institution not exactly known for its openness and tolerance. As a younger, U.K.-born mixed-race journalist who covered the royals day in, day out, I knew this was a significant moment in British and royal history and that Meghan’s journey was going to be fascinating and far from easy. A fairy tale this was not.
As I observed many British outlets turn a blind eye or struggle to recognize the thinly veiled racism and bigotry that ran rife through their newspapers and magazines, and as I watched the Palace stand by and say nothing in response, I decided to cover Meghan’s journey more objectively, but also from a vantage point closer to her reality on the ground. Hers was an important story to tell. And thanks to connections in the entertainment industry, her former world, I had sources on both sides to provide deeper insight—something the reporters at the papers didn’t have at the time. Working only for American media outlets (a decision I made early on in my career), from Good Morning America to ABC News to Harper’s Bazaar, also meant I was lucky enough to be part of more diverse and inclusive teams than one would find in most British newsrooms (only 8 percent of the country’s journalism workforce is non-white, and the majority of those aren’t in senior positions). These were colleagues who consistently understood and wholeheartedly supported my approach to the job. Back on home shores the response was vastly different. My coverage offering both sides of the story—and an empathetic approach to the journey of a mixed-race woman in the royal institution—was met with criticism and attacks from the press. The likes of the Mail, Telegraph, and Express hastily resorted to name-calling (mouthpiece and cheerleader being two of their many favorites), and it soon became clear that the presence of a journalist offering a different take enraged them. While other royal reporters quietly got on with their jobs, I found myself dealing with tabloid reporters digging into every possible aspect of my life and, more disturbingly, harassing my family. This type of bullying had two main aims: to diminish my journalistic credentials (and therefore the strength of my reporting) and get back at me for calling out misleading and racially insensitive coverage.
My reporting on Harry and Meghan’s story radically and quickly shifted my own social media landscape, too. As a journalist I was no stranger to a heated letter or negative comment here and there, but this was the first time I was the target of regular racially motivated hate. The day the Daily Mail started referring to me as “British-Iranian” (despite having never pointed out the ethnicity of other royal correspondents), the personal attacks gassed up, initiating daily tweets that told me I had no right to be speaking about “our” British royals. And as the online vitriol toward Meghan got worse, so did it toward me:
“Fuck off back home paki”
“MI6 should keep an eye on this terrorist”
“Needs to be driven through a Paris tunnel”
“Show respect to the monarch who let you stay in this country in the first place”
“Camel jockey who needs to worry about his own country”
This is just a minuscule slice of the daily tweets, direct messages, and online comments I receive. I won’t bore you with the hundreds of variations of messages from furious royalists telling me to kill myself.
As for Meghan, even in the early days, the ugliness was inescapable. In January 2018, the partner of a right-wing populist political party leader was exposed for sending racist text messages about Meghan. In leaked WhatsApp messages, Jo Marney—girlfriend of U.K. Independence Party leader Henry Bolton—claimed Harry’s “black American” fiancée will “taint” the royal family with “her seed” and pave the way for a “black king.” She continued, “This is Britain. Not Africa.” Other extremists shared similar sentiments, many emboldened by the stream of subtle digs in newspaper opinion pieces and on daytime television. Six former Metropolitan Police officers, including one who went on to be employed by the British Home Office, were charged with sending offensive and racist messages, including slurs about Meghan, in a private WhatsApp group they started in August 2018. And a British court also heard how two white-supremacist podcasters said Prince Harry should be “judicially killed for treason” for marrying Meghan, and called their son, Archie, “an abomination that should be put down.” The Welshmen, who have since been convicted of terror offenses, claimed their Black Wolf Radio podcast comments were simply “freedom of speech.” That old chestnut.
By the beginning of 2019, Meghan had become the most trolled person in the world. As she pointed out on an episode of the Teenager Therapy podcast, for eight months of this grim period she was pregnant or on maternity leave. “What was able to just be manufactured and churned out, it’s almost unsurvivable,” Meghan said. “That’s so big you can’t think of what that feels like, because I don’t care if you’re fifteen or twenty-five, if people are saying things about you that aren’t true, what that does to your mental and emotional health is so damaging.”
Again, the Palace did virtually nothing to help, either behind the scenes or in their public communications. During the peak of it in late summer 2018, I received a call that I thought was from the couple’s head of communications at the time, Sara Latham. We had been texting back and forth about an upcoming royal engagement. “Hi, Omid!” a female voice chirped. It was different to Latham’s northwestern American accent. “It’s Meghan.” I put my iced coffee down, not quite sure if the call was a prank. “We saw your name keep coming up on the phone . . . and I just wanted to say hi, see how you’re doing.” Sara had mentioned to her that I was dealing with my own online harassment and threats.
Though I appreciated the conversation, it was also deflating. Here was someone checking in on a journalist she still only really knew through a byline, when so many of the people in her royal orbit—including those on payroll—wouldn’t do the same for her. It said so much about the state of the Firm—their ineptitude at protecting one of their own and their failure to comprehend the scope of the damage done because of their silence.
Later that same day, I spoke with a senior member of their team, and they were brutally honest about Meghan’s situation. “She will give you the impression that all is fine but it’s clearly taking its toll . . . It’s really bad, Omid,” they admitted, almost tearful themselves. “Without support there’s little I can do, either.”
The Firm’s protective shield—so often used when royals are in crisis, including Prince Andrew’s never-ending ordeal—was never offered up for Meghan. And the system wields that shield whenever it’s deemed necessary. It’s impossible to forget the time Kensington Palace issued an official statement in defense of Kate after a plastic surgeon had suggested to a newspaper that she, then the Duchess of Cambridge, had “baby Botox” injections to reduce wrinkles. And when Charles and Camilla received a barrage of negative comments on Clarence House Instagram posts after the premiere of the fourth season of The Crown, aides wasted no time in switching off the ability to comment on posts.
“They didn’t see Meghan as important enough to care for—simple as that,” said a friend of the duchess. “No matter who asked, no matter what was pointed out, no matter how loudly she told them, or we told them, that she was struggling . . . she was expected to shut up and deal with it quietly.” And Harry said, “I thought my family would help but every single ask, request, warning, whatever, got met with total silence or total neglect. I felt totally helpless.”
