Did Meghan leak private email about Kate to her author ally?
The Duchess of Sussex’s biographer has published an email in which she demands aides release a statement claiming Kate drove her to tears at a bridesmaid dress fitting.
Omid Scobie wrote yesterday that harry and Meghan’s exasperation with officials came to a head when Kensington Palace ‘urgently requested’ harry join forces with them in co-signing a statement critical of a newspaper report.
he said the palace wanted him to deny an ‘offensive’ article in The Times in January 2020 which claimed that Prince William had ‘constantly bullied’ the Sussexes before they decided to quit royal duties.
he writes that a source revealed Meghan emailed an aide: ‘Well, if we’re just throwing any statement out there now, then perhaps KP can finally set the record straight about me [not making Kate cry].’ he then says she asks why her side of the story was never considered important to anyone at the palace.
‘But, as with many requests made by the couple, her suggestion was ignored,’ he writes. ‘The Duchess of Cambridge, she was told, should never be dragged into idle gossip.’
The article was written for the website of US magazine harper’s Bazaar.
The email was clearly a private one, sent by Meghan to only two or three of her most senior staff at most.
Its quoting in full raises the question of how it came into the author’s possession and was it leaked by the Duchess of Sussex herself?
If not, then surely, critics asked yesterday, she would be complaining that a private email had been published without her knowledge.
The issue is one that has clearly irked Meghan for some time as she raised it in her interview with Oprah Winfrey on Sunday night.
The original story, published in a British broadsheet newspaper in 2018, claimed that Meghan had made Kate cry during a fitting for Princess Charlotte’s bridesmaid dress, possibly in a row over whether she should wear tights.
In the programme Meghan says: ‘The truth? The reverse happened. A few days before the wedding, she was upset about something – yes, the issue was correct, about the flower girl dresses – and it made me cry and it really hurt my feelings.’
She went on to claim that Kate apologised and brought her flowers and ‘took accountability for it’.
But Meghan said that no one at the palace was willing to help her set the record straight, even when friends asked if they could dispute the story for her through the media.
‘everyone in the institution knew it wasn’t true, ‘ Meghan told Miss Winfrey, who asked: ‘So why didn’t somebody just say that?” Meghan replied: ‘That’s a good question.’
Mr Scobie, who co-authored the Sussexes’ biography Finding Freedom, went on to accuse Buckingham Palace of ‘failing to acknowledge racism’ aimed at a mixed-raced senior royal and questioned the monarchy’s commitment to the ethnically diverse Commonwealth.
And shockingly, Mr Scobie wrote: ‘If it’s not considered appropriate to acknowledge racism or racial ignorance when aimed at a mixed-raced senior royal, then how should the 54 countries of the Commonwealth and its predominantly black, brown, and mixed population feel about the realm’s figurehead belonging to an institution that claims to celebrate “diversity” but in practice appears to uphold white supremacy?’
Finding Freedom was last year’s favourable, if somewhat controversial, biography about harry and Meghan’s relationship.
The exceptional level of detail in it – from what happened on the couple’s first date to the fact that harry was impressed that his future-wife would go into the African bush to go to the toilet when they camped and what kind of emojis he sent on text messages – sparked speculation that the the duchess and her closest friends had heavily co-operated with it.
It also charted the deepening rift between the Sussexes and the rest of the Royal Family from their perspective.
Mr Scobie, who wrote the book with fellow journalist Carolyn Durand, denied that he had ever spoken to Meghan herself, however.
‘Upholds white supremacy’