Harry and Meghan ditch her glitzy PR team to go it alone
...and all hell broke loose after it was published. But as an authoritative book by the writer who first revealed bullying claims against Meghan shows, that was just another day in the hair-trigger world of the Sussexes
PRINCE Harry and Meghan Markle have ditched their starry New York-based public relations outfit.
Sunshine Sachs had been advising Ms Markle since her days as an actress on legal drama Suits.
But a source told the Mail that Ms Markle now ‘takes the view that she doesn’t need to pay an outside firm a lot of money to do PR for her and Harry any more’ adding: ‘This is a really big deal for Meghan.’
Sunshine Sachs’ partner Keleigh Thomas Morgan played a key role in establishing Harry and Meghan in California, sharing her network of advisers and famous friends. A long-term friend of Meghan’s, she helped devise the strategy for the couple’s African tour in 2019, when they were still working members of the royal family.
Ms Thomas Morgan, 45, was a guest at the royal wedding and has also represented American actor Tyler Perry, whose Los Angeles mansion Harry and Meghan used as a base while house-hunting.
But from now on the publicity for their numerous ventures is being handled ‘in-house’ at their charitable foundation, Archewell, by former Silicon Valley top adviser Christine Schirmer, who is head of communications.
Ms Schirmer is likely to be kept busy in her role as not only does Meghan’s series of podcasts for audio giant Spotify resume next week, but the couple have a string of big projects in the pipeline including Harry’s highly controversial autobiography and a reality TV show for Netflix.
Harry and Meghan refuse to communicate with the popular press, while a Sunshine Sachs spokesman declined to comment.
However, a source with knowledge of the company’s relationship with the couple insisted: ‘When Sunshine Sachs began working with the duke and duchess, the plan was always for it to be temporary until a full-time internal team could be created. After they were hired, Sunshine Sachs worked alongside them to help the transition. All sides are on good terms and periodic advisory work continues.’
TThe prince ‘did not trust his father’s courtiers’
HESE days — when, in Britain at least, the Duke of Sussex is no longer the massively popular figure he once was — it is important to remember that working with Harry used to be fun.
He was brimming with ideas and enthusiasm, and had an informal approach that inspired a sense of camaraderie among his small and close-knit team.
Royal tours had their serious moments, but Harry wanted to make sure there were some light-hearted ones, too: that it wasn’t all stress and logistics. It was, said an insider, ‘tremendous fun’.
At the end of a busy day of engagements, they would go and have a drink and a meal together (although Harry never touched alcohol on official tours).
Ever the man of action, Harry would constantly be throwing out ideas, which his team would try and turn into reality.
‘He is the kind of guy who has ten ideas a day, nine of which are totally bonkers, but one of which is actually pretty good.’ (One of his great ideas was the Invictus Games, a Paralympic-style event for injured servicemen and women.)
He also wanted a good, close relationship with everyone who worked for him.
It was an interesting contrast to what would happen after he married Meghan: she appeared to have strict demarcation lines, and usually did not have anything to do with anyone other than the most senior officials.
If Harry’s energy and enthusiasm were one side of the coin, his frustration with the system was the other.
‘He’d feel frustrated by the bureaucracy, being told “you cannot do that, you cannot visit them, you cannot announce this there, because there is something else happening with the palace”,’ said one source. ‘It rattled him... It made him think: “I’m being held back, I’m having my time wasted.”’
Harry’s biggest problem, one that no one could talk him out of, was that he believed his time was running out.
‘He had this thing, that he had a shelf life,’ says one insider. ‘He was fixated [on] this. He would compare himself with his uncle [Prince Andrew].
‘He would say: “I have this time to make this impact. Because I can.” Until [Prince] George turns 18, was the way he was thinking about it. “Then I will be the also-ran.”’
His staff tried to dissuade him, telling him: ‘You can still have an impact in your 40s, 50s, even longer. So long as you set the right foundations now. You’re not going to retire like a footballer at 35.’
But Harry never saw that. He just thought he had to have the biggest impact he could before people forgot about him.
At the same time, he was extremely frustrated with the media. Endless staff hours would be taken up pursuing his grievances over inaccurate articles. ‘There were constant battles with the media, and expecting the team to be on your side,’ said one insider. ‘That was a big part of the relationship with the office, the battles that he was fighting all the time.
‘He was always on Twitter. So you then had to be on everything, too. Every minor infraction was a big deal.’
His advisers knew they weren’t going to change the system singlehandedly. Neither did they want to be constantly sending out legal letters to media organisations, because they felt the situation would become unnecessarily antagonistic.
But it was where Harry wanted to go — and, indeed, where he has since gone.
Harry’s perceived enemies weren’t just in the media. ‘He definitely had mistrust of the courtiers at Buckingham Palace, and his father’s place,’ said one source.
That mistrust, and Harry’s permanent sense of frustration, could, in turn, lead to tensions within Kensington Palace.
There was a lot of anger, which, although it was not necessarily directed at his staff, made for an intense atmosphere.
Another source recalled: ‘He would use this phrase the whole time, “the palace syndrome”, when you won’t fight the battles he wants, because you have been institutionalised. Giving in to the media was a key symptom of whether you had developed it.
‘The team fighting all these battles — it was a constant test of loyalty: “Are you going to protect me? Or have you just become one of them, who won’t fight for me?” It was exhausting.’
There is one crucial point to note in all of this. Harry’s obsession with the media; his sense of frustration that he wasn’t achieving everything that he could; his mistrust of the courtiers in the other households; the constant loyalty tests of his own staff: all of this was there before Meghan arrived on the scene. But after she turned up, it would get significantly worse.
NO SOONER had Harry’s relationship with Meghan Markle been made public than the massive invasion that he had feared began. He became determined to protect his girlfriend.
However, his desire to rein in the media was motivated by more than just a sense that it was the right thing to do.
Meghan had told him that if he did not do something about it, she would break off the relationship.
A source said: ‘She was saying: “If you don’t put out a statement confirming I’m your girlfriend, I’m going to break up with you.”’
‘Harry was in a panic. Another said: ‘He was freaking out, saying: “She’s going to dump me.”’
Harry, who had first met Meghan in London three months earlier, phoned his communications secretary, Jason Knauf, demanding that he put out a statement confirming that Meghan was Harry’s girlfriend.
She wanted public validation that this was a serious relationship, not a passing fancy. She was also convinced that the palace was unwilling to protect her from media intrusion.
In a conversation that revealed much about Meghan’s view of the royal household, as well as being a foretaste of what was to come, she told Harry’s staff: ‘I know how the palace works, You don’t care about the girlfriend.’
Knauf felt that he had no choice other than to mount a full-throated defence of Meghan.
It was not usual palace practice, but Knauf told the prince he did not feel bound by any protocol. If Harry wanted a statement, he could have a statement.
The statement, written by Knauf, said Meghan had been ‘subject to a wave of abuse and harassment’. It also condemned ‘the racial undertones of comment pieces’ and ‘the outright sexism and racism of social media trolls and web article comments’.
The other royal households —
Buckingham Palace and Clarence House — were very unhappy about Kensington Palace releasing such a combative statement.
As one royal aide said: ‘It would have been so much better had he instructed his office to confirm the relationship and left it at that.’
Those fraught conversations between Harry and Meghan and Kensington Palace staff took place just days after the couple’s relationship became public knowledge. They weren’t even engaged, let alone married. Things would later get a lot worse.
TO BEGIN with, everything was great. Communications secretary Jason Knauf loved working for William, Kate and Harry.
And — as we have seen already — when Meghan came along, he dedicated himself wholeheartedly to protecting the couple’s interests against the media.
That statement he put out in November 2016, condemning the media over its coverage of Harry’s new girlfriend, significantly damaged his own relations with the media and also went down badly with the other royal households. But if that was what the couple wanted, that was a price he was prepared to pay.
However, keeping Meghan happy — and, by extension, keeping Prince Harry happy — was an ongoing challenge.
Long before the couple got engaged, Harry’s staff knew that Meghan was different from other royal girlfriends.
In the spring of 2017, more than six months before the couple were officially engaged, she allegedly told one of Harry’s advisers: ‘I think we both know I’m going to be one of your bosses soon.’
One of the changes that followed was that Meghan needed a new PR team to help her in the US.
The palace communications setup would deal with everything royal-related, but her former PR advisers, while perfectly adept at getting her guest spots on chat shows, were not deemed up to the job of dealing with her new celebrity status.
A serious player was needed who was used to dealing with A-listers, and Knauf helped her find Keleigh Thomas Morgan of Sunshine Sachs, whose clients have included Hollywood stars Salma Hayek, Jane Fonda and Natalie Portman.
With Morgan on board, Meghan agreed to do an interview with Vanity Fair for their October 2017 issue. This was something Kensington Palace was happy for her to do, but they were going to leave the negotiations to Morgan.
Ostensibly to mark the 100th episode of Suits, the interview was, in effect, Meghan’s big launch. The couple were not officially engaged — though everyone in Kensington Palace knew they had been privately engaged since the late summer — but this was Meghan putting herself out there in a confident, pro-active way.
With a glamorous picture of the actress on the cover, all hair and freckles, and a headline that proclaimed loudly ‘She’s Just Wild About Harry’, the article quoted Meghan speaking openly about her romance with the prince.
‘We’re in love,’ she said. ‘This [time] is for us. It’s part of what makes it so special, that it’s just ours. But we’re happy. Personally, I love a great love story.’
Sweet, yes? And she looked great, didn’t she? But Meghan hated it. And she was furious with Keleigh Thomas Morgan. ‘She was very unhappy with how that had been handled,’ said a source. ‘And she was looking to throw blame in every possible direction, despite it having been a positive piece.
‘She did not like the photographs. She thought the story was negative. She was upset that it was about Harry, not about her.’
And the clincher? It was racist. What upset her was the headline. She and Harry pointed out that the song, ‘I’m Just Wild About Harry’, had been performed by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney as a blackface number in the 1939 film Babes In Arms.
‘They [Harry and Meghan] tried to get it changed online, because [they thought] it had been racially motivated,’ said the source. ‘[Meghan] was so angry with Keleigh, she wanted to fire her.’
Things eventually settled down. But for a while Keleigh was out in the cold with Meghan.
MEANWHILE, relations between Meghan and the staff at Kensington Palace were beginning to fray. In late 2017, after the announcement of the engagement, a senior aide discreetly raised with the couple the difficulties caused by their treatment of staff.
People needed to be treated well and with some understanding, even when they were not performing to Harry and Meghan’s standards, they suggested. Meghan was said to have replied: ‘It’s not my job to coddle people.’
Meghan wasn’t dealing with the more junior staff, people that William and Kate — and Harry, before Meghan came along — had been quite happy to engage with.
It seemed she wanted respect, and having to talk to someone a bit further down the pecking order — in a small office, where there wasn’t much of a pecking order — wasn’t treating her with respect.
‘She would take it as an insult,’ suggests one source.
Organising any wedding is stressful, and perhaps a royal wedding is
Harry was petulant and short-tempered
more stressful than most. But Harry and Meghan’s proved to be particularly challenging.
There were rows about scheduling, rows about wedding announcements, rows about the gospel choir. Most famously of all, there was the row about the tiara, when Harry shouted at the Queen’s dresser, Angela Kelly.
Around the same time, Meghan spoke particularly harshly at a meeting to a young female member of the team.
After Meghan had pulled to shreds a plan she had drawn up, the woman told Meghan how hard it would be to implement a new one. ‘Don’t worry,’ Meghan told her, ‘if there was literally anyone else I could ask to do this, I would be asking them instead of you.’
Later, Prince William, who had heard of some of the treatment she had been subjected to, came to find the woman. ‘I hope you’re OK,’ he told her. ‘You’re doing a really good job.’ She promptly burst into tears. Other members of staff also came under fire, sometimes from both Harry and Meghan. Harry became ‘petulant and short-tempered’ during the preparations for the wedding, famously telling staff: ‘What Meghan wants, she gets.’
Once, when Meghan felt she had been let down over an issue, she rang repeatedly when the staffer was out for dinner one Friday evening. ‘Every ten minutes, I had to go outside to be screamed at by her and Harry.
‘It was: “I can’t believe you’ve done this, you’ve let me down,
It felt like ‘emotional cruelty’
what were you thinking?” It went on for a couple of hours.’
The calls started again the next morning and continued ‘for days’, the staffer said. ‘You could not physically escape them — it was last thing at night, first thing in the morning.’
Not to mention the 5am emails from Meghan. Relations between the couple and some of their senior staff became so fractious that Miguel Head, William’s private secretary, had to step in.
One staffer who had been having a rough time told a colleague the couple were ‘outrageous bullies’, adding: ‘I will never trust or like them again, but have made peace with that.’
The colleague replied: ‘That’s so dreadful. And they are bullies.’
Through her lawyers, Meghan has emphatically denied ever having bullied anyone. There can be no doubt, however, that she could be a demanding boss.
After the wedding, problems continued, brought into focus by the departure of Meghan’s PA, Melissa Touabti, just six months after joining the palace.
She was the second PA to leave since Meghan’s arrival. After her departure, an official Kensington Palace statement paid tribute to the ‘pivotal role’ she’d played in helping to organise the wedding.
‘She ... will be missed by everyone in the royal household,’ it concluded. Later, however, it was reported that Meghan had reduced Melissa to tears.
A source said: ‘Her job was highly pressurised and in the end it became too much. Meghan put a lot of demands on her.’
Since then, palace sources have said the clashes centred on the gifts from companies that were constantly arriving at Kensington Palace. ‘Clothes, jewellery, candles ... it was non-stop,’ said one.
Touabti was apparently punctilious in following the household rule that the royal family cannot accept freebies from commercial organisations. Her approach did not go down well with Meghan.
A source said: ‘[For] an actress it was perfectly acceptable. But she had to be told it was not the done thing for a royal.’
The steady trickle of stories — about staff leaving, about Meghan’s demanding ways — added up to a narrative that didn’t reflect well on her. She was difficult. She wasn’t nice to her staff. She didn’t like Kate. Newspapers began to call her Duchess Difficult.
Meghan’s supporters tried to defend her, suggesting she was the victim of racism or sexism, or both. A friend was quoted as saying: ‘She’s the easiest person in the world to work with.’
That wasn’t quite true. For the previous few months, the Sussexes’ communications secretary Jason Knauf had been growing increasingly concerned about how staff were being treated by Meghan — and Harry, too.
In October 2018, he emailed his immediate boss, Simon Case, Prince William’s private secretary (later the Cabinet secretary). Knauf confided that he’d spoken to the palace’s head of HR about ‘some very serious problems’ concerning Meghan’s behaviour.
‘I am very concerned that the Duchess was able to bully two PAs out of the household in the past year . . .’ he continued.
‘The Duchess seems intent on always having someone in her sights. She is bullying X [name withheld] and seeking to undermine her confidence. We have had report after report from people who have witnessed unacceptable behaviour towards X despite the universal views from her colleagues that she... is delivering first-rate work.’
Knauf concluded by saying that [head of HR, Sam] Carruthers ‘agreed with me on all counts that the situation was very serious’.
Surprisingly, no one senior in the institution was made aware of his complaints.
Part of the problem, according to one source, was that everyone in the palace was so genteel and civil: ‘When someone decides not to be civil, they have no idea what to do.
‘They were run over by her, and then run over by Harry.’
Two-and-a-half years after Knauf sent his memo, in May 2021, I wrote an article revealing the bullying allegations — and a number of sources came forward to back up his claims.
Two senior members of staff claimed they’d been bullied by the duchess. Another aide claimed their treatment felt ‘like emotional cruelty and manipulation, which I guess could be called bullying’.
A spokesman for the Sussexes dismissed the allegations, saying they were the victims of ‘a calculated smear campaign based on misleading and harmful misinformation’.
It can, of course, be hard to define exactly when a particular behaviour amounts to bullying.
Meghan’s solicitor Jenny Afia made precisely that point, saying that allegations of bullying were used ‘very freely’ to damage career women.
And as two of Meghan’s greatest cheerleaders — the authors of Finding Freedom, Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand — put it: ‘Americans can be much more direct, and that often doesn’t sit well in the much more refined institution of the monarchy.’
However, that also does not sit well with the fact that Knauf, the person who had made the bullying allegation, is an American, too.
According to some people inside the palace, the issue was about more than just Meghan’s American straight-talking.
Another former staff member said: ‘I had unpleasant experiences with her. I would definitely say [I was] humiliated.’
One staff member — named in Knauf’s memo — was so petrified of how Meghan would react when she found out about it that she felt sick. ‘She’ll blame me for it, which will make tomorrow absolutely horrific,’ they said.
Another dreaded a confrontation after a mix-up over media arrangements for one of Meghan’s engagements: ‘This is so ridiculous. I can’t stop shaking.’
As one source said: ‘There were a lot of broken people. Young women were broken by their behaviour.’ One member of staff, they said, was ‘destroyed’.
The palace’s reaction to the bullying claims? Just hours after my story was published, it released a statement saying it was ‘genuinely concerned’ about them.
‘Accordingly,’ said the statement, ‘our HR team will look into the circumstances outlined in the article . . . The Royal Household . . . does not and will not tolerate bullying or harassment in the workplace.’
It later emerged that the palace had appointed an outside firm of solicitors to conduct the inquiry. In June this year, however, Buckingham Palace said it wouldn’t release the outcome of the inquiry, supposedly on grounds of confidentiality.
Most suspected that the real reason they were burying the report was to try to keep the peace with Harry and Meghan.
But it was one thing to suppress a report and another to stop people talking. As I’ll reveal tomorrow, Meghan’s relationship with senior staff would deteriorate even further . . .
‘Young women were broken by their behaviour’
■ ADAPTED from Courtiers: The Hidden Power Behind The Crown by Valentine Low, to be published by Headline on October 6 at €15.99. © Valentine Low 2022.