Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have issued a brutal statement against Jeremy Clarkson in their ongoing feud with the 62-year-old British TV host.
On Monday, Clarkson posted an apology to Markle “all the way from the balls of my feet to the follicles on my head” for a December column, published in British newspaper The Sun, where he said he hated the Duchess of Sussex “on a cellular level.”
Clarkson revealed that he sent the copy to editors of the publication without reading the story a second time, “but I was home alone on that fateful day, and in a hurry. So when I finished, I just pressed send.”
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Parts of the article, which went viral soon after it was published, read: “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.”
In his Instagram post, Clarkson said he was able to ignore the ciriticism initially, “but the rumble got louder” and it was then that he picked up a copy of the newspaper and realized the mistake that he had made.
He described being “sweaty and cold at the same time,” noting “I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Had I really said that?”
The article prompted over 6,000 complaints to Ipso, the U.K.’s press regulator.
“I was very angry with myself because in all those controversial days on Top Gear, when I was accused of all sorts of things, it was very rarely sexism...I’m just not sexist and I abhor violence against women.”
Clarkson described how family, friends and colleagues were “furious” with him, so he decided to fix the problem by writing an apology note.
He then emailed Harry and Meghan on Christmas Day morning, he said, to apologize to them personally.
“I e-mailed Harry and Meghan in California to apologise to them too. I said I was baffled by what they had been saying on TV but the language I’d used in my column was disgraceful and I was profoundly sorry.”
However since Clarkson’s post, Harry and Meghan have reportedly come out swinging.
A spokesperson for the couple has dismissed Clarkson’s claim, telling E! News that the letter was only addressed to Harry and that “the contents of his correspondence were marked Private and Confidential.
“While a new public apology has been issued today by Mr. Clarkson, what remains to be addressed is his long-standing pattern of writing articles that spread hate rhetoric, dangerous conspiracy theories, and misogyny,” the Duke and Duchess’ spokesperson told E!
“Unless each of his other pieces were also written ‘in a hurry,’ as he states, it is clear that this is not an isolated incident shared in haste, but rather a series of articles shared in hate.”
Clarkson ended his Instagram post asking: “So can I move on now?” He continued: “Who knows? Very soon now I shall be a grandfather so in future, maybe I’ll just write about that.”
