It’s not an overstatement to say that few public figures have faced as much unwarranted vitriol as Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, who has been relentlessly vilified ever since she started dating Prince Harry back in 2016.
When she and Harry first met, Meghan was a thriving 35-year-old who’d carved a successful acting career for herself with a lead role in the hit series Suits. She also ran a lifestyle blog called The Tig, which she’d founded in 2014, and often used her platform to speak up on important issues close to her heart.
News broke that she was dating Harry in November 2016, and the knee-jerk response from the British public and tabloids at the time was confusion. After all, Meghan was an American, an actor, a divorcée, and, of course, mixed race — and while the press coverage started innocently enough, it quickly turned incredibly sinister.
In fact, after she and Harry got married in 2018, Meghan was subjected to a constant stream of baseless tabloid scrutiny, where she was criticized for everything from eating avocados to how she wished her then-6-year-old nephew Prince George a happy birthday on Instagram.
Negative false stories were also circulated by the British press during this time, and Prince Harry has since claimed that Meghan was targeted as a result of the Royal Family’s longstanding relationship with the British media, stating: “They were happy to lie to protect my brother, they were never willing to tell the truth to protect us.”
Either way, it soon became hard to ignore the fact that much of this resentment toward Meghan hinged on racism, with BBC presenter Danny Baker sharing a racially-charged photo comparing Harry and Meghan’s first child, Prince Archie, to a chimpanzee following his birth in 2019. And in 2021, Piers Morgan sensationally stormed off the UK breakfast show Good Morning Britain after his Black costar Alex Beresford called out his daily trashing of Meghan.
These are, sadly, just some of the examples that highlight the kind of Meghan rhetoric that dominated mainstream media in the UK at the time, and this campaign of abuse has undeniably had a lasting impact on the way that she is perceived by some parts of the general public.
And despite the fact Meghan and Harry decided to step away from being working royals as a direct result of the way she was being treated back in 2020, Meghan is seemingly still living in her haters’ minds rent-free, with the very vocal group appearing to be so devoted to finding an issue with everything that the Duchess does, they have lost all common sense — and this week’s example is perhaps the most unhinged of all.
As you may have seen, Meghan attended Paris Fashion Week on Saturday, and her latest unforgivable crime, per the critics, was…driving through Paris. Yes, really.
I’m sure you know that Harry’s mom, Princess Diana, tragically died in a fatal car crash in Paris in 1997, and subsequently, Meghan has been subjected to all manner of abuse for recording the view out of her window as she drove through the French city at night while stretched out in her car.
Various publications have reported that Meghan was “near” to Diana’s crash site after they spotted landmarks in her video, but a map especially created by the Daily Mail actually shows that she was literally on the entirely other side of the River Seine when she captured the footage.
Still, that’s apparently enough to stoke the unhinged backlash, with royal expert Richard Fitzwilliams even telling the same publication: “I don’t understand what on earth she was thinking — well, she can’t have been thinking. No adviser would ever advise doing something so strange. She has every right to go to fashion events, but to share a video, which had any connections with the tragic death of the Princess of Wales, defies belief.”
But thankfully, common sense appears to be fighting back, with many people quick to call out how unfair this latest vilification of Meghan is. Quoting a New York Post tweet that read: “Meghan Markle puts her feet up on limo ride in ‘insensitive’ video near Princess Diana’s crash site,” somebody simply added: “what😭,” and this sentiment has been liked more than 100,000 times.
Unsurprisingly, Meghan has not dignified this latest round of scrutiny with a response, but be sure to let me know your thoughts in the comments below!