In this episode of Decomplicated by The Independent, we dive into the online hate machine targeting Meghan Markle. As her latest podcast faces fresh backlash, we unpack how criticism turns into clicks—and how entire industries profit from tearing her down. From tabloids to YouTubers, we explore who’s fuelling the noise, why it’s so relentless, and what it says about race, royalty, and the internet. It’s not just gossip—it’s big business. We break it down, no nonsense, all clarity.
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00:00That was good. Yeah, that was a good one.
00:03When Megan Sussex released her latest offering last week,
00:06a podcast entitled Confessions of a Female Founder,
00:09in which she interviewed Bumble's CEO and BFF, Whitney Wolf Hurd,
00:14the reactions were predictably dire.
00:18The Guardian said,
00:19Megan's sycophantic interview podcast is stomach-turning,
00:23giving the podcast just two stars.
00:25The Telegraph also gave it two stars,
00:27saying Megan's podcast is an inane stream of mindless aphorisms.
00:32One British TV station even went so far as to call the podcast insane,
00:37which feels like an over-exaggeration
00:39for what was essentially 45 minutes of chit-chat between friends.
00:43Is the podcast particularly insightful?
00:46No.
00:47You know when your brain goes in a loop?
00:49Yeah.
00:49Those 3 a.m. loops and it's just like you can't stop overthinking the thing
00:53and how are you going to address that?
00:55And oh gosh, how are we going to pivot?
00:57And does it matter?
00:58But is Megan really deserving of all this vitriol?
01:02Also no.
01:03She's become the woman people love to hate,
01:05an easy target who really doesn't behave that differently from other celebrities.
01:10Some have called it the industry of hate,
01:12and Megan is the woman at the centre of it.
01:14But why?
01:15Until 2016, Megan Markle was just your everyday actress.
01:22She'd had a starring role in Suits,
01:25her own lifestyle blog, The Tig,
01:27and a host of famous friends.
01:29So far, so normal in Hollywood terms.
01:32So yeah, Megan and I were friends and we had a really nice friendship for a few years
01:36until she met Harry and then decided that it was time to maybe bump off some of her friends
01:40and carry on with the others.
01:42She was very altruistic, very confident.
01:46She was looking at opportunities to get modelling gigs.
01:48And she really loved sort of UK, sort of what we stood for.
01:53She loved England, she loved the countryside.
01:54So she felt very akin to that.
01:56But in 2016, after it was revealed she was dating Prince Harry,
02:00things were set to change.
02:02And almost overnight,
02:04she became one of the most talked about women on the planet.
02:08One great thing about Megan was that she was this huge breath of fresh air.
02:12And I think a lot of people identified with her.
02:14People who might not necessarily have even thought about the royal family suddenly did.
02:19Theirs was the romance that spawned a thousand think pieces.
02:21And many of them were not good.
02:26People dug into her relationships, her career,
02:29and the fact that she was once on Deal or No Deal.
02:32There is an air of,
02:36why couldn't Harry pick a nice English rose like William did?
02:40Definitely an undercurrent, an undertone of that.
02:45With anything that Megan, the Duchess of Sussex does,
02:48of course, she's always held to a higher standard.
02:51You know, glamorous, former actress,
02:54humanitarian, someone completely different,
02:58a biracial woman within the family.
03:00Everything has to be absolutely supremely fantastic.
03:04Anything that she does comes under the same level of savagery and scrutiny.
03:09And there is a whole industry built around disliking her.
03:14Like it's a job for some people.
03:17Megan is the greatest PR person in the world because she can generate, you know, views.
03:23And Netflix loves her for that and click-throughs and listens, etc.
03:26But also she's her own worst enemy.
03:28In many ways, her face is excessive of a brand and built it that way.
03:33One of the things that I see now with her and as ever in the brand that she has,
03:36that's what she wanted to do all those years ago.
03:39She was an influencer for her time.
03:41There is a certain American-ness to her and to a lot of Americans and not just her,
03:48that a lot of British people just doesn't really sit right with them.
03:51And that's absolutely fine.
03:53But then you've got this added level of vitriol, of hate for her.
03:59So where does the vitriol come from?
04:02And what does it say about modern British attitudes towards royalty and celebrity?
04:06Listen, celebrity is built on basically a deity.
04:09You know, they're seen as a bit of a god to people and people worship them.
04:13And that's why they have their fan mails.
04:15And that's why they have their Instagram followings.
04:17And you can tell like their followers, it's like Jesus, you know.
04:20And the fact of the matter is that's what they're like.
04:22There's this real sort of looking down your nose at an actress.
04:26It's someone who's divorced, it's someone who's American,
04:28that someone's a bit older than their spouse.
04:31You know, that is such a classist way of thinking as well,
04:34along with the racism and the misogyny,
04:36along with this kind of snobbery that we have.
04:39It might seem that we've reached peak saturation with our royal fixation,
04:42but really this is nothing new,
04:45particularly when it comes to women in the royal orbit.
04:48What you will find is women who marry into the royal family,
04:51if you look back in history, always get a hard time.
04:54The women in the royal family get a hard time,
04:57but women who marry into the royal family get a harder time.
05:00Sarah, Duchess of York, was written about her and her way.
05:04Princess Diana, all the things that were written about her.
05:07And then you've got obviously people like Wallace Simpson,
05:10you know, who again were being given all this amazing jewellery
05:13and was seen to be somebody who was made someone abdicate in the end.
05:17So, you know, all eyes have been on the royal family.
05:19They don't get away lightly.
05:21She's loved now, but Catherine, Princess of Wales,
05:24was once dubbed Waity Katie because of how long she waited for Prince William to propose.
05:29Princess Diana faced relentless backlash and scrutiny for breaking royal protocol,
05:34particularly after her Martin Bashir interview,
05:36which was seen to bring scandal on the royal family.
05:39Diana played her role as a superstar celebrity,
05:43not as a member of the royal family.
05:45Princess Anne plays it as a member of the royal family.
05:48She doesn't play it as a celebrity.
05:50And Meghan herself has always played it as a celebrity.
05:54Queen Camilla faced years of criticism and was even called too common
05:58to marry into the royal family.
06:02I mean, even Princess Beatrice's hat made headlines.
06:05But the sheer scale of the backlash towards Meghan is in a class of its own,
06:09especially because she's not even a royal anymore.
06:11The great British press have decided, mostly, have decided that Meghan Markle is the villain.
06:18She's the villain of the piece and the piece being the ever-arching narrative of the royal family.
06:24She is the villain of the piece.
06:26She will continue to be the villain of that piece.
06:29That absolutely suits their narrative.
06:31It's not going to be Prince William.
06:33It's not going to be the Princess of Wales or the King or Queen or even Prince Harry,
06:38although he does get his fair share of savagery in the press.
06:41It is Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.
06:44This kind of latent racism kicked in and a lot more bullying than we'd seen before.
06:51And that was a real shame on Meghan and Harry.
06:54And I can see that must have been so difficult for them to navigate.
06:57Things only got worse when she and Harry denounced their royal titles in 2020.
07:03It's the audacity of her to continue in spite of everything that has been written about her.
07:10That's what it is.
07:12So how dare she continue?
07:14How dare she not crumble under all this pressure, scrutiny and hatred that we have poured on her?
07:23So is there more at play here?
07:25Harry is fifth in line to the throne.
07:26It's unlikely he would ever become king.
07:29And even then, there's no guarantee he would want the role.
07:32So where does our fixation with him, and therefore the woman he's with, come into play?
07:37Everybody saw this young boy, you know, behind the coffin and they felt they wanted to adopt him.
07:42And when people have grown up with him and they've seen him with Chelsea Davey
07:46and they've seen him on various different dates, we feel that we've wanted to be there for him.
07:50Basically, the pair are damned if they do, damned if they don't.
07:53Who can forget the infamous Oprah interview where they try to share their side of the story?
07:57But I also am acutely aware of where my family stand and how scared they are of the tabloids turning on them.
08:08Because I'm sorry, I see right through it.
08:10It's complete nonsense.
08:11The hypocrisy is off the charts.
08:14You know, I look at her as the Katie Price with a Duchess title.
08:17She's similar to that in many ways.
08:19Katie Price is somebody who spent all her life basically monetising every single part of her existence.
08:25Whether that is about her tragedies, whether that's about her love life, whether that's about her brand.
08:30And that's really what Meghan's doing.
08:32She's utilising every single part of her existence and she's getting money from it.
08:37That's one of the biggest problems with Meghan Markle or Meghan Sussex is that she isn't genuine or people perceive her to be disingenuous.
08:46Recent YouGov polling shows that Meghan's popularity in the UK has plummeted,
08:51with only 4% of adults saying that they feel very positive about her.
08:55This drops even lower among boomers, unsurprisingly, where the number sits at a dismal 1%.
09:01We are, as a nation, as we know, stiff off her lip.
09:06So when you see her on a show like Oprah, talking about things that we kind of maybe not address ourselves in the UK,
09:12then we're like, okay, now you're p***ing us off.
09:15Now you're really annoying us.
09:17In America, it's very different.
09:18They love a confessional.
09:19They love to see this woman who's been wronged, part of the royal family, a fairy tale.
09:25Suddenly, actually, she's saying that she's in the ashes and now she's like a phoenix.
09:30So she's playing to two different demographics of people.
09:35When With Love, Meghan dropped on Netflix in March, she occupied even more airtime,
09:40with people criticising her for being...
09:43Oh my gosh, Meghan Markle is insufferable.
09:46This is despite the fact that it became a top 10 hit on Netflix in both the UK and the US.
09:51And it's already been commissioned for a second season, which will come out in the autumn.
09:55You've got all these people who will also make a business and make a thing out of hate listening.
10:01So I'm going to listen to it because I hate it.
10:04That, like, I think I could never.
10:06Like, I could literally never.
10:08It's like a psychosis.
10:09It doesn't make any sense.
10:11And is it because they want to say they've listened to it so they can hate it with knowledge?
10:16Okay, sure.
10:17Then you've got people who will just not even listen and then tell you it's trash.
10:22And that is just annoying.
10:25So yes, people love to hate Meghan, but she's the one having the last laugh.
10:30Her as-ever range sold out in just 30 minutes, including 20-pound jars of honey.
10:37And her podcast, however slated, made it into Apple's top 10, number six in the podcast charts,
10:43and was the number one business podcast within 24 hours of its launch.
10:48So why the outrage?
10:50I think that in the UK we have an attitude towards her.
10:55I think that it is pretty unconscious, but actually it's kind of conscious in many ways
11:00because people want to love to hate her.
11:02I'll be honest, I don't think unconscious bias exists, right?
11:06I don't believe in that term.
11:08I don't think it's a thing.
11:10It's about acknowledging a bias that you have and thinking about how you can undo that
11:15and regard yourself and other people better.
11:17People don't want to think that about themselves.
11:22They don't want to think that I'm racist or I'm misogynistic or I'm a snob or I'm classist.
11:29They don't want to accept that that is a thing in society.
11:33They don't want to accept that that might be something that they have perpetuated.
11:38And so there'll just be a complete denial and put the blame back on her.
11:42So whether you love her or hate her,
11:44you've really got to question whether being so obsessed with one woman is healthy.
11:49It's certainly not as healthy as these flower petals.
11:50It's todas las suces.
11:55So that's a great idea.
11:57You can'tbble up a little girl.
11:57So they don't want to maintain and then turn the chat out.
11:58You can tell me that you should plan on your channel.
11:59See if you can see how it works out.
12:01So let's take a little bit more out,
12:03the catap laser will cut the hat out.
12:04So let's take a little bit more out of this.
12:05So the right thing is that,
12:06we're not getting the catapjes.
12:09I don't know what it looks like ...
12:10I don't know what it looks like,
12:12and it's picked up on just because it turns out.
12:14We're out of this myself.
12:16Put this together then?
12:17So we can bend the makeup of this.