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Meghan Markle Shows She's Still Not Ready to Accept Her Flaws
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Meghan Markle was asked what she would have done differently to re-write her narrative and responded: "I would ask people to tell the truth."
The Duchess of Sussex was asked the question as a guest on the Aspire with Emma Grede podcast, but her answer is problematic for a number of reasons.
The most obvious is that the veracity of some of her own and Prince Harry's past statements has been called into question.
However, there is a second underlying issue, which is that she did not actually answer the question that was put to her, and swerving it speaks to a longstanding flaw in her messaging.
Meghan Markle attends the Children's Hospital Los Angeles gala at L.A. Live Event Deck, in Los Angeles, California, on October 5, 2024.
Meghan Markle attends the Children's Hospital Los Angeles gala at L.A. Live Event Deck, in Los Angeles, California, on October 5, Meghan Markle Told Emma Grede About 'The Truth'
Grede asked Meghan: "If you could rewrite your public narrative from scratch, is there anything that you would do differently?"
The duchess replied during Tuesday's episode: "Yes, I would ask people to tell the truth."
The remark sparked a perhaps predictable backlash from the British press, with some newspapers going as far as suggesting it was a veiled attack on the monarchy.
It is easy to see how some might view the comment as hypocritical after some of Meghan and Harry's own statements have been publicly questioned.
For example, Meghan's account of an unnamed royal expressing "concerns" about her unborn child's skin tone in March 2021 prompted King Charles III to write to Meghan to say the comment was simply curiosity, according to biography Endgame.
And when Harry told ITV in January 2023 that Meghan had never accused the royals of racism but rather unconscious bias, it prompted some to argue that if the public had misinterpreted her comments, the couple should have corrected the record right away instead of waiting around a year and a half.
Dickie Arbiter, a former spokesperson for Queen Elizabeth II, also said he was misquoted in Prince Harry's book, Spare, which suggested he was part of a "Fleet Street jury" and "concluded, with his fellow jurors, that we should hereafter
'expect no mercy'" following the couple's decision to quit royal life.
In reality, the quote had come from British journalist Sir Trevor Phillips, while Arbiter told Newsweek he deserved an apology, though he did not get one.
There are innumerable other examples, from the Archbishop of Canterbury correcting Harry and Meghan's account of marrying in secret to the couple contradicting each other in relation to Meghan's first curtsy to Queen Elizabeth II.
In their 2022 Netflix biopic, Meghan said she messed up the curtsy: "I mean, Americans would understand this. We have Medieval Times Dinner & Tournament [a dinner theater]...it was like that."
But in Spare, Harry wrote: "Meg went straight to her and dropped a deep, flawless curtsy."
And, of course, Queen Elizabeth II responded to their 2021 Oprah Winfrey interview with the famous line: "Some recollections may vary."
The problems, though, go beyond the question of whether it is hypocritical for Meghan to demand the truth from others.
Prince Harry Denounces the Media Days Into Their Relationship
Not least of all, the couple effectively did ask people to tell the truth, albeit using a more elaborate form of words.
Harry released a statement through Jason Knauf, the communications secretary at Kensington Palace, on November 8, 2016, just more than a week after their relationship became public knowledge, which stated: "The past week has seen a line crossed. His girlfriend, Meghan Markle, has been subject to a wave of abuse and harassment.
"Some of this has been very public—the smear on the front page of a national newspaper; the racial undertones of comment pieces; and the outright sexism and racism of social media trolls and web article comments.
"Some of it has been hidden from the public—the nightly legal battles to keep defamatory stories out of papers; her mother having to struggle past photographers in order to get to her front door; the attempts of reporters and photographers to gain illegal entry to her home and the calls to police that followed; the substantial bribes offered by papers to her ex-boyfriend; the bombardment of nearly every friend, co-worker, and loved one in her life."
The reference to "defamation" and a "smear" was a clear indication Harry felt the stories in the papers were untrue.
And that was itself a re-iteration of Harry's longstanding and very well-known position in the British media.
For example, when he turned 21, he gave an interview in which he spoke about how protective he was of then-girlfriend Chelsy Davy: "I suppose that is the media in general. There's truth and there's lies and unfortunately I can't get the truth across because I don't have my own column in the paper."
Meghan also made similar comments during an interview in 2019 for ITV documentary Harry & Meghan: An African Journey: "I never thought this would be easy, but I thought it would be fair. And that is the part that is hard to reconcile."
All of these interventions were interpreted as pleas for the media to tell the truth at a point when Harry had very firmly established his position that the tabloids were full of lies.
Needless to say, none of these interventions resolved the couple's conflicts with the media.
Harry and Meghan's Inability to Acknowledge Their Own Flaws
In reality, Meghan's answer has the effect of deflecting the question away from how she might have done things differently and onto her frequently repeated existing narrative about what others should have done differently, namely, she wanted them to tell the truth and feels they did not.
And it has been said for years that for all their criticisms of other people, Harry and Meghan have done nowhere near enough to acknowledge their own flaws.
Rather than batting the question away, Meghan could have finally engaged with the idea that some aspects of her current situation may be a product of her own past mistakes.
Prince Harry told Anderson Cooper during his 60 Minutes interview in January 2023: "Meghan and I have continued to say that we will openly apologize for anything that we did wrong, but every time we ask that question, no one's telling us the specifics or anything."
However, that statement is hard to reconcile with the passage of his book Spare, in which he described tensions with the staff: "Nerves were shattering, people were sniping. In such a climate there was no such thing as constructive criticism. All feedback was seen as an affront, an insult.
"More than once a staff member slumped across their desk and wept. For all this, every bit of it, Willy blamed one person. Meg. He told me so several times, and he got cross when I told him he was out of line."
The question of whether there is anything Meghan and Harry might have done differently may well come up again in the future, and it might not be the worst idea for them to have an actual answer for it that does not deflect the blame onto others.
Jack Royston is chief royal correspondent for Newsweek, based in London. You can find him on X, formerly Twitter, at @jack_royston and read his stories on Newsweek's The Royals Facebook page.
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