A Vanity Fair writer who was “ahead” of the curve for American journalists doing critical examinations of Meghan Markle opened up this week about what she’s learned since profiling the American duch*ess of Sussex in 2018.
In a conversation with ex-BBC journalist Andrew Gold for his On the Edge podcast, Vanessa Grigoriadis explains why Meghan is the product of her upbringing in a dysfunctional family on the fringes of Hollywood, the world’s so-called dream factory.
As Grigoriadis explained in the podcast and in her Vanity Fair story, the wife of Prince Harry is an ambitious “striver” who has long sought to be “a household name” and to rise above her family’s middle-class but unconventional “shaggy-dog tale” existence. To do that, she worked hard in high school and college, struggled to make it in Hollywood, aggressively courted press attention as a B-list cable TV actor and crafted narratives about her life that are not necessarily aligned with “reality.” Grigoriadis agreed that the latter is a very Hollywood thing to do.
“What we know now about her is that she has a sort of a strange relationship to objective reality,” Grigoriadis said. “She has this warped reality and then she marshalls evidence underneath it to support a thesis that may not be the case.”
In Grigoriadis’ Vanity Fair story, which looks at the breakdown in Meghan’s relationship with her father, Thomas Markle, and her older half-siblings, she offered an example of the duch*ess’ self-mythologizing. When Meghan and Harry were still working members of the royal family, they embarked on a highly successful royal tour of Australia and the South Pacific. Crowds loved the duch*ess’ “almost magical mix of micro-management and moments of authenticity,” Grigoriadis wrote.
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But Meghan’s “perfection” was “pierced” after she delivered a speech at a university in Fiji about the importance of college and of funding girls’ education, Grigoriadis said.
“It was through scholarships, financial aid programs, and work-study where my earnings from a job on campus went directly towards my tuition that I was able to attend university,” Meghan said. “And, without question, it was worth every effort.”
Meghan’s claims about putting herself through Northwestern University were moving and inspiring. But Grigoriadis and Gold said Meghan was clearly trying to place herself in a seemingly relatable rags-to-riches “Cinderella story,” laced with strong-independent-woman self-sufficiency.
Grigoriadis wrote that Meghan might not have been telling the truth — at least according to her estranged half-sister, Samantha Markle, who immediately took to social media to call B.S. on her college story. Samantha Markle said their father, a retired Hollywood lighting designer, paid for her college education. At the time, Samantha Markle called Meghan “delusionally absurd.”
In the podcast interview, Gold doesn’t ask Grigoriadis if Meghan is “delusional.” But he said he wonders how the former TV actor compares to the narcissists and sociopaths the writer met doing investigative stories on the NXIVM cult. Grigoriadis said Meghan isn’t “a psychopath,” but she said it’s her “hunch” that there is something off about “all of them” — meaning Meghan and her family.
As Meghan has been in the eye for close to seven years, she has begun to reveal some problems with “authenticity,” as Gold said. Grigoriadis described how those issues became apparent to her when she first reported on Meghan in 2018. Grigoriadis was told by people who knew the former “Suits” star that she can easily come across as warm and personable, but that she also isn’t “someone you can be friends with.”
Grigoriadis also mentioned a writer colleague, who spent a day with Meghan at her home in California, for a magazine profile.
“Her takeaway was, ‘This person just is not on the level,'” Grigoriadis said, with her friend also saying, “I don’t want to be here.”
While Grigoriadis didn’t name the writer or her publication, it’s easy to wonder whether she was talking about Allison P. Davis, a writer for The Cut who reportedly was handpicked by Meghan to write a profile of her. The 6,400-word story, titled “Meghan of Montecito,” was both a blockbuster and highly controversial.
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Davis spent the day interviewing Meghan at her mansion in Montecito, where she moved after she and Harry departed left royal life in 2020. At first, it seemed that Davis had crafted a glowing tribute to the duch*ess, but bit by bit the story revealed itself to be a carefully worded takedown of her pretensions about her California lifestyle, her marriage, her parenting choices and her importance in royal history. It also presented the Northwestern theater major as performing through the interview, speaking as though she had “a tinyBachelor producer in her brain directing what she says.”
Grigoriadis said she tried to get the writer to come on her own podcast, “Infamous,” but Davis refused. The writer said that people had been coming after her on the internet who are “stans of Meghan,” Grigoriadis said.
Meghan clearly wasn’t happy with the story, telling Variety a couple months later that she tends to be “really trusting, really open” but that she could “survive” the setback. By December, Newsweek royal reporter Jack Royston suggested that the story may have marked a turning point in how the American media covered Meghan and Harry, with American critics freely picking apart the couple’s Netflix documentary, “Harry & Meghan,” especially their continued practice of sharing royal secrets to stay relevant.
Grigoriadis agreed that the American media had long been in love with the Sussexes. She said she got pushback for her 2018 profile, with an editor telling her “We’re not going to say anything negative about Meghan.”
That’s in contrast with much of the British media, especially the tabloid press. While Grigoriadis said she’s not a fan of the tabloids, she disputed that idea that the tabloids were overwhelmingly racist or cruel to Meghan when she and Harry were first dating. Mostly, the tabloids were curious about the new woman in Harry’s life and were happy to sell newspapers by playing up the romance, she said.
Certainly, the tone changed after Meghan and Harry married, with stories starting to pop up about “tiara-gate” and either Meghan or Kate making the other cry before Meghan’s wedding, Grigoriadis reported in Vanity Fair.
She also disputed the idea that theU.K. tabloids were this horrific “monster” in Meghan’s life. They may have been a monster for Harry, given that the paparazzi hounded his mother, Prince Diana, when she was alive and were present at her death, she said.
Harry also has been in London this week, to attend a hearing for a lawsuit against Associated Newspapers, the publisher of the Daily Mail, alleging that its editors and reporters engaged in phone hacking and other means of illegal information gathering. Harry is one of seven claimants in the lawsuit, including Elton John, who say that Associated Newspapers invited their privacy privacy by using private detectives to intercept their phone calls and voicemails and to put tracking and listening devices on cars and in homes.
Grigoriadis differentiates between whatever Harry experienced from the tabloids and what Meghan dealt with.
“It’s not a monster in her mind because she is the one who would go out for drinks with Piers Morgan,” Grigoriadis said. “She was desperate for the press to be interested in her.”
Grigoriadis also said it’s become apparent that both Meghan and Harry believe they have “an ace in the hole” when it comes to addressing negative media attention. Harry will bring up how his mother “was killed” by the media. In this way, the media becomes “evil” and any press manipulation the Sussexes engage in is “completely justified” because they “are fighting this enormous braying monster,” Grigoriadis said.
This story has been updated.
