Is the Hate for Meghan Markle Fair?

Why Is This Woman So Polarizing? A Look at "Endgame" and "Spare"

Meghan Markle must have generated more negative column inches of space and bytes of data than any famous person I can remember. I know she has fans, known as the “sugars” by some...but she certainly has a lot of haters. There is even a “Quora” group devoted to her and the Sussex clan, “The Unlikers.”

But for someone who has done philanthropic work for women, mental health, and other causes, is it fair she is seen as some kind of Antichrist by so many of her detractors? After reading both the new book “Endgame,” by Omid Scobie, and Prince Harry’s “Spare,” I think she has a side of the story worth considering.

OK, so I can see some of the criticism…has she really cut off her family for no good reason? Maybe, but maybe too we don’t know all her reasons, because we aren’t her. Frankly, I thought her admission of having suicidal thoughts during the time she was pregnant with son Archie, and so much negative press and social media comments came her way, was very brave. (Of course, if you’ve read some of my other blog posts, you’ll know why suicide awareness is important to me).

Harry made arguments in his “Spare” book that he and his then new wife were not protected by the royal family; the security was revoked. But in Scobie’s book, we can see from his insider sources — courtiers that work for the British royal family, some members of the press, and the like — that the royals don’t play fair when it comes to protecting some members of the family.

For example, when there was gossip in the British papers about Prince William and Rose Hanbury having some kind of fling, a senior palace source said, “We have to make this stop.” And stop it did.

But when the Sussex’s Kensington Palace Instagram account was “swarmed with slurs and hate speech,” and Scobie told an aide that palace staff could block specific key words from appearing in comments, they said a higher-ranking aide said “it would be ‘inappropriate’ to start censoring comments.” Comments “with the n-word, monkey, [and] …dagger emojis”…steadily appeared, and were visible for days or weeks before being deleted.

And false stories are not denied. For example, a yarn about Meghan supposedly rejecting a wedding tiara the Queen offered is “fatuous and erroneous from start to finish,” according to Scobie, but was never publicly denied by anyone at the palace.

The TiaraGate tale is told in detail by Harry in “Spare” — it’s simply that the Queen invited Meghan to come look at tiaras, which she did, and picked one out; and then later a staffer of the Queen’s named Angela claimed to be too busy to see the tiara walked over to Kensington Palace. But Angela finally mysteriously appeared out of the blue with the topper at the last minute, the day Meghan’s hairdresser came. Meghan did not reject one of the Queen’s tiaras.

I’m not the only one baffled by the magnitude of Meghan hate out there. “What has Markle done to deserve widespread attacks and hatred? Had I missed some horrific news story about her?” wrote journalist Toure in TheGrio. “Did she drive drunk and murder someone? Did she say hey, maybe Hitler wasn’t a bad guy? I mean, the amount of hatred she gets is greater than the hate that many people who’ve done truly horrible things get. What’s going on?”

When he Googled to figure it out, he came across a lot of the fake drama and manufactured reasons that I see as well:

“I went down a rabbit hole and found a lot of flimsy excuses. Stuff that sounds like people decided to hate her and then looked for reasons why. They’re mad that she held hands with her husband at the queen’s funeral — too much PDA. She cried at the funeral — she’s fake sad. Prince Harry held an umbrella for her at some event — she’s stealing his spotlight. She wore a dress that royals are not supposed to wear — why do you care about their arcane rules? She was mean to some unseen person in some out-of-context moment we saw a snippet of on the internet. She’s rich, but she cares about the poor and the environment, which makes her a hypocrite. She curtsies wrong. She’s controlling poor Harry. She’s fame hungry. She’s… I threw all that balderdash out because it’s all a smokescreen for what’s really going on here. Those are the things that are socially acceptable to say, but they’re not the real problem.”

Even if that stuff was done in the… mean? or — calculating? way the haters imply, which no one even could know, who cares? And to imply that she’s such a big social climber is specious. First of all, a ton of people are social climbers. Why is it just ambition for some people but wrong for others?

Second of all, it was Prince Harry who reached out to meet Meghan, not the other way around. If you read his book, Spare, you will get the story -- he saw a photo of her with the doggie ears filter on a mutual friend’s Instagram account, and asked his friend about her and if an intro could be arranged.

The vitriol and “who does she thinks she is” remarks remind me of something another famous Black American woman said — Oprah Winfrey. “I was once afraid of people saying, ‘Who does she think she is?’ Now I have the courage to stand and say, 'This is Who I am,’” she has said.

Some speculate that hate is directed at Meghan because she ultimately rejected being a cog in the monarchy’s regime. But she and Prince Harry made the decision together…and as he’s said their safety was at stake, can you blame him, or her, for wanting to protect each other, themselves, and their children?

The hate does take the form of physical threats sometimes. At one point a group of haters challenged people to pop the air bubble that was no doubt Meghan’s faked pregnancy.

And Sun columnist Jeremy Clarkson wrote of dreaming of her being paraded naked through British streets “while the crowds chant ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her.” (That column has now been removed, but Toure emphasizes that Clarkson “also said what he believed and his editor saw fit to publish it.”).

Toure sees the real problem as race. “Markle entering the whitest of the globe’s white families thus forcing people to see Black and white as equals is extremely frightening for people who value whiteness and view the royals as an important symbol of it.”

He says Markle circumvented all of that, and pointed out that R.S. Locke, a freelance writer, explained it this way in 2021: “A biracial woman enters the top of the pyramid by marriage, negating both the birth and blood requirements society had previously been told were preconditions. Because she lacks those prerequisites, she’s considered unworthy. Because she’s proud of her own heritage and regards herself as equal to others at the top of the pyramid, she’s considered ungrateful.” 

Some called Meghan’s treatment a ritual hazing — which Kate Middleton never got. And Camilla got her PR on, if what we read in books and see in “The Crown” is true. But, again, the royal family or their spokes-courtiers did not stand up for Meghan. “They’ve never said that a negative public comment about her is unacceptable, and their silence has tacitly told the British media that attacking her is fine,” wrote Toure. 

As a white person, I can’t speak much to the racist angle, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I think, as an advocate for mental health, and a mom who lost a son to depression and suicide, I don’t like to see people who are struggling not be supported…to be told to just buck up and deal with it.

The latest rumor is Markle is writing her own book: “My information is that she is writing her memoirs and it will be a huge money-spinner,” said Tom Bower, author of Revenge, to GB News in September.

Good…I hope she does. Maybe she can actually gain from the negative publicity and hate that will no doubt accompany it. After all, they say the only thing worse than bad publicity is no publicity at all. But at least she can get something for it.

This hits on a final reason for all the Markle hate…it sells.