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After months of negative publicity, in which she has been portrayed as a demanding diva who makes her staff (and Kate Middleton) cry, Meghan Markle struck back this week, with five of her friends giving what appeared to be sanctioned and carefully coordinated interviews to People magazine in the U.S., in which they sought to portray Meghan as caring, selfless, and down to earth.
The interview was long on detail that was catnip to royal fans: Meghan cooks for herself and Harry ‘every night’ and leaves slippers and a robe out in a candlelit room for friends who come to stay with her in their London cottage.
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But the intervention has reopened the controversy over her father’s claims that he has been sidelined and ignored by the duchess.
The friends essentially said Mr. Markle’s claims that he has reached out to Meghan on multiple occasions—he said late last year that he texts her “every day”—are false.
“He knows how to get in touch with her. Her telephone number hasn’t changed. He’s never called; he’s never texted. It’s super-painful because Meg was always so dutiful. I think she will always feel genuinely devastated by what he’s done.”
Samantha Markle, Meghan’s half-sister reacted to the article by firing off a succession of angry tweets.
“PeopleMagazine this article is total bulls*** there are plenty of text messages and receipts to prove otherwise. Stop the PR crap,” read one, while another said, “When a narcissist has lost control over you, they try to control how others see you. And if the narcissist is wealthy they pay very expensive PR teams to change the way people see you.”
The friends quoted have now been widely identified by the media. The Sun, for example, is claiming they are Meghan’s Pilates teacher Heather Dorak; friend Benita Litt, whose kids were pageboys at the wedding; Suits actress Sarah Rafferty; actress Janina Gavankar; and Northwestern University-era friend Lindsay Jill Roth.
The friends said Mr. Markle “wouldn’t get in” a car sent to take him to the airport ahead of her wedding, and ignored Meghan’s panicked messages in the frenzied days before the ceremony, when his will-he-or-won’t-he-show completely derailed the carefully constructed palace narrative.
The friend told People that after the wedding, Meghan wrote him a letter saying: “Dad, I’m so heartbroken, I love you. I have one father. Please stop victimizing me through the media so we can repair our relationship.”
“He writes her a really long letter in return, and he closes it by requesting a photo op with her.
“And she feels like, ‘That’s the opposite of what I’m saying. I’m telling you I don’t want to communicate through the media, and you’re asking me to communicate through the media.’”
Many commentators were quick to suggest that if Meghan really had authorized the friends to make these statements and disclose these intensely personal details of her relationship with her father (and it is hard to imagine they were not, and Kensington Palace wouldn’t say either way when contacted by The Daily Beast), she is doing exactly what she had begged her father not to do—communicating through the media.
No matter how much sympathy you feel for Meghan and the situation she is in with her father—not to mention the racism and misogyny she has faced—as the veteran royal correspondent Robert Jobson and author of Prince Charles at 70 told The Daily Beast: “How can you criticize the old man for doing something and in the same breath do it yourself?”
Jobson said that while he understood the frustration that Meghan must feel at not being able to get her side of the story across, ordering five “friends” to start anonymously briefing the media was “a bit daft, especially when you consider Prince Charles spends over a million pounds a year on the press offices of himself and his children.
“Why would you pick five friends to anonymously start briefing the media unless you were totally unsatisfied with your press people? If the story is true, and there really were five people who were authorized to do this, it implies she doesn’t trust the palace press team. Leaving your own press people in the dark and going over their heads is not a good idea, because they might not be there for you when you need them.”
Of course, the palace itself could have been totally on board with the PR strategy.
Jobson added that he is (and it might be added, most people who have followed the story are) fairly certain that Markle “had tried to get in touch with his daughter” and been rebuffed.
The royal biographer Penny Junor also questioned the wisdom of the interviews. She told The Daily Beast that Meghan needs to now make it a priority to build bridges with her father, regardless of who is at fault over the estrangement.
“We cannot know the truth of whether she has tried to be in touch with her father, or he with her. We just do not know. But what is very clear is she needs to sort out this thing with father. It is high time Harry met his father-in-law, and they need to get on a plane and go out there and see him. Lots of people have difficult parents, people will totally understand that, but, at the moment, he has got the upper hand in terms of publicity and public sympathy. There is no point trashing him through anonymous friends.”
Meghan’s decision to authorize friends to speak to journalists hitting out at her dad was also, Junor added, alarming because it was “very reminiscent of the Princess of Wales hitting out at her husband via the media.” (Junor is, and has always been, strongly Team Charles.)
Of course, the very real possibility exists that Meghan never intended the friends to go into specifics about letters sent to and from her father. If that is the case it merely re-emphasizes the risks of using non-professional spokespeople to brief the media.
Asking friends to talk to the media, Junor says, is “only one step away from Diana calling journalists herself. Meghan is supping with the devil and she doesn’t have a long enough spoon. Nobody has a long enough spoon.” (True, but Charles also had powerful friends in the media, like Junor, and spoke to them. The royals know how to play a ruthless media game as well.)
Few will blame Meghan for fighting back, but this may not in the long run be a wise or sustainable policy.
The group of women, whose names were not given, said they were concerned about the “emotional trauma” the constant criticism of Meghan could be having on her and her unborn baby, but, predictably, their intervention has simply stirred multiple issues up again.
The whole point of the queen’s off-quoted strategy of “never complain and never explain” is that responding to and engaging with negative stories often merely extends and amplifies public fascination with them.
It’s likely, for example, that 99 percent of the readers of People magazine would have forgotten about the time when it was claimed Meghan asked for the chapel she was to be married in to be spritzed to clear musty odors. The denial of that story in People magazine will only serve to remind them of it.
The decision of Meghan to authorize her friends to speak to an American tabloid magazine will not go down well at the palace. But now is not the time for the palace to be angry with Meghan and freeze her out.
It is a time for compassion and understanding.
In the BBC documentary Diana, 7 Days, William said of his mother’s famous Panorama interview with Martin Bashir: “I can understand, having sometimes been in those situations, you feel incredibly desperate and it is very unfair that things are being said that are untrue. The easiest thing to do is just to say, or go to the media yourself, open that door. [But] once you’ve opened it you can never close it again.”
If the palace is smart, it will acknowledge that it has not adequately supported Meghan—or her family—on an extraordinary transition and will see this piece in People for what it is: a desperate cry for help, and an opportunity to build a better media strategy around Meghan, and what she wants to say (and not say) herself.
