Jeremy Clarkson on Monday said he is “horrified to have caused so much hurt” with a hate-filled newspaper article he wrote about Meghan Markle.
Excerpts from an opinion piece written by the British TV host, 62, for The Sun newspaper went viral over the weekend. In the article, published Friday, Clarkson said he hated the Duchess of Sussex “on a cellular level.” “At night, I’m unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her,” Clarkson wrote.
The article was roundly criticized on social media and prompted over 6,000 complaints to Ipso, the U.K.’s press regulator—almost half the total number of complaints the organization received in 2021, the BBC reports.
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“Oh dear,” Clarkson tweeted on Monday. “I’ve rather put my foot in it. In a column I wrote about Meghan, I made a clumsy reference to a scene in Game of Thrones and this has gone down badly with a great many people. I’m horrified to have caused so much hurt and I shall be more careful in future.” He stopped short of offering an apology.
In his offending article, Clarkson claimed: “Everyone who’s my age thinks the same way,” adding: “But what makes me despair is that younger people, especially girls, think she’s pretty cool. They think she was a prisoner of Buckingham Palace, forced to talk about nothing but embroidery and kittens.”
Among those who criticized Clarkson, who was dropped by the BBC in 2015 after punching a Top Gear producer, was his 28-year-old daughter. Emily Clarkson posted a scathing message about her father’s words on Instagram. “My views are and have always been clear when it comes to misogyny, bullying and the treatment of women by the media,” Emily wrote. “I want to make it very clear that I stand against everything my dad wrote about Meghan Markle.”
Clarkson, who now hosts the reality show Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime Video, penned his column about Markle following the release of new episodes of the Netflix series Harry & Meghan last week. The new shows saw the couple criticize the British press for its coverage of Markle and allegedly fomenting online abuse against her.
Elsewhere in Clarkson’s Sun article, he said his “hate” for Markle was different from the way he hates Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon or serial child killer Rose West. Speaking to BBC Scotland on Monday, Sturgeon addressed being named in the piece, saying: “The overwhelming emotion I have for men like Jeremy Clarkson is pity. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be so consumed and distorted by hate of other people, and in his case it appears women in particular, that you end up writing that toxic, vile abuse.”
