Why I feel sorry for Meghan Markle (and so should you)

Meghan Markle doesn’t exactly make it easy to like her, does she? She’s currently on a... shall we say, self-promotional tour of Australia (others would call it a “grift”), where she’s trumpeting her lifestyle brand, “As Ever”, as well as charging £1,400 per ticket for an appearance at a luxury “girls weekend” in Sydney. Before that, there were the scented candle-making scenes in her now defunct Netflix series, With Love, Meghan.

The Duchess of Sussex is ambitious, ruthless and — when she so chooses — carefully and competitively “tradwife”, too. One minute she’s making us all feel inferior by donning an apron to make her signature jam, before laying out pressed flower garland necklaces (carefully chosen for her children’s individual birth months and then set in UV resin, of course), the next she is laying into her in-laws and extended family and allegedly arguing with TV execs. She’s a sort of shape-shifting, smiling enigma — and enigmas, when you’re not quite sure what’s really behind the façade, can be hard to like (here’s looking at you, Melania Trump).

Yet this week, Meghan might have won me over. Just. How? Well, just as Prince Harry sounded incredibly sincere when he talked about losing his mother, Princess Diana, at a leadership summit in Melbourne (the Duke of Sussex revealed he felt "lost, betrayed, or completely powerless" and said that experiencing grief as a kid “while in a goldfish bowl under constant surveillance... can break you”), Meghan spoke out about her experiences of living life through a lens, too. And to be honest, it sounded completely horrific.

That’s because the Duchess, while no Princess Diana — who was, after all, adored all over the world; known for her kindness, her dedication to charity and to her family (though it was interesting that the memory of her lingered so palpably behind both Meghan and Harry’s speeches) dropped the smoke and mirrors and for a brief moment, allowed a moment of rare candour to shine through. And in doing so, she got me — right in the feels.

While speaking at an event at Melbourne's Swinburne University of Technology about the harms of social media, alongside her husband, Meghan revealed that she was “bullied” every day for a decade. She said bluntly that for 10 years, she was the “most trolled person in the entire world” online. And she laid into big tech companies, which she claimed were "not incentivised to stop" their platforms being used to abuse her.

"When I think of all of you and what you're experiencing,” she told the assembled group, “I think so much of that is having to realise that that industry, that billion-dollar industry, that is completely anchored and predicated on cruelty to get clicks — that's not going to change. So, you have to be stronger than that."

Now, the fiercest critics may say that in being quite so “strong” she somehow “deserved” her ill-treatment, that if you put yourself out in the public sphere so openly, so overtly “to tender” — and the reported $100m (£73m) agreement the couple signed with Netflix in 2020, which brought us shows like With Love, Meghan, With Love, Meghan: Holiday Celebration and Harry and Meghan (before the couple’s deal with the streaming service was downgraded last year to a “multi-year, first look deal”), was exactly like that — then you also open yourself up to criticism. It’s “fair game”. Isn’t it?

Well... not really. It doesn’t feel like “fair game” when you consider the kind of abuse Meghan — a woman of colour — has uniquely experienced at the hands of social media, trolls, certain sections of the media and at Buckingham Palace itself (for who can forget those racism allegations that came out during the tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021).

She’s right. She may not have helped herself along the way, for the kind of self-aggrandising self-promotion that has become so synonymous with Meghan’s “brand” can be hard to swallow (and feels like a far cry from the angelic ways Princess Diana approached her own charitable endeavours) but she has been the most trolled person in the entire world, for an entire decade. And that intense, deer-in-headlights-style scrutiny is identical, in many ways, to the way Princess Diana was also treated. Her husband — the boy who watched his mother targeted by the press and then lose her life — can see it, and so can we. He was perfectly right to worry about “history repeating itself”.

After all, the late “People’s Princess” really did become the “most hunted person of the modern age”, as expressed by her brother, Charles Spencer, at her funeral. In a blistering eulogy on 6 September 1997 — just a week after she was killed in an infamous car crash in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris, France, while the car was being pursued by photographers — he laid into his sister’s treatment at the hands of the tabloids.

Earl Spencer revealed how Diana, in the year after her divorce from (then) Prince Charles, “talked endlessly” of leaving Britain, mainly because of the treatment she received at the hands of the tabloid newspapers. It’s not difficult to draw links between the treatment Meghan has suffered at the hands of “The Firm,” the media and on social media — and it’s difficult to pooh-pooh her experiences about being “bullied” over the past decade. Princess Diana is the ghost haunting the feast of the couple’s four-day business/charity tour of Australia. And given we all know what happened to her, it should haunt us, too.