IN THOSE FIRST HOURS and days of November 2016 there was a new low every few minutes. I was shocked, and scolded myself for being shocked. And for being unprepared. I’d been braced for the usual madness, the standard libels, but
I hadn’t anticipated this level of unrestrained lying.
Above all, I hadn’t been ready for the racism. Both the dog-whistle racism and the glaring, vulgar, in-your-face racism.
The Daily Mail took the lead. Its headline: Harry’s girl is (almost) straight outta Compton. Subhead: Gang-scarred home of her mother revealed—so will he be dropping in for tea?
Another tabloid jumped into the fray with this jaw-dropper: Harry to marry into gangster royalty?
My face froze. My blood stopped. I was angry, but more: ashamed. My Mother Country? Doing this? To her? To us? Really?
As if its headline wasn’t disgraceful enough, the Mail went on to say that Compton had been the scene of forty-seven crimes in the last week alone. Forty-seven, imagine that. Never mind that Meg had never lived in Compton, never even lived near it. She’d lived half an hour away, as far from Compton as Buckingham Palace was from Windsor Castle. But forget that: Even if she had lived in Compton, years ago or currently, so what? Who cared how many crimes were committed in Compton, or anywhere else, so long as Meg wasn’t the one committing them?
A day or two later the Mail weighed in again, this time with an essay by the sister of London’s former mayor Boris Johnson, predicting that Meg would…do something…genetically…to the Royal Family. “If there is issue from her alleged union with Prince Harry, the Windsors will thicken their watery, thin blue blood and Spencer pale skin and ginger hair with some rich and exotic DNA.”
Sister Johnson further opined that Meg’s mother, Doria, was from “the wrong side of the tracks,” and as stone-cold proof she cited Doria’s dreadlocks. This filth was being blasted out to three million Britons, about Doria, lovely Doria, born in Cleveland, Ohio, graduate of Fairfax High School, in a quintessentially middle-class part of Los Angeles.
The Telegraph entered the fray with a piece slightly less disgusting, but equally insane, in which the writer examined from all angles the burning question of whether or not I was legally able to marry a (gasp) divorcée.
God, they were already into her past and looking at her first marriage.
Never mind that my father, a divorcé, was currently married to a divorcée, or my aunt, Princess Anne, was a remarried divorcée—the list went on. Divorce in 2016 was deemed by the British press to be a scarlet letter.
Next The Sun combed through Meg’s social media, discovered an old photo of her with a friend and a professional hockey player, and created an elaborate yarn about Meg and the hockey player having a torrid affair. I asked Meg about it.
No, he was hooking up with my friend. I introduced them.
So I asked the Palace lawyer to contact this paper and tell them the story was categorically false, and defamatory, and to remove it immediately.
The paper’s response was a shrug and a raised middle finger. You’re being reckless, the lawyer told the newspaper’s editors. Yawn, said the editors.
We already knew for a fact that the papers had put private investigators onto Meg, and onto everyone in her circle, in her life, even many not in her life, so we knew that they were experts on her background and boyfriends. They were Meg-ologists; they knew more about Meg than anyone in the world apart from Meg, and thus they knew that every word they’d written about her and the hockey player was hot garbage. But they continued to answer the Palace lawyer’s repeated warnings with the same non-answers, which amounted to a mocking taunt:
We. Don’t. Care.
I huddled with the lawyer, trying to work out how to protect Meg from this attack and all the others. I spent most of every day, from the moment I opened my eyes until long past midnight, trying to make it stop.
Sue them, I kept telling the lawyer, over and over. He explained over and over that suing was what the papers wanted. They were hungry for me to sue, because if I sued that would confirm the relationship, and then they could really go to town.
I felt wild with rage. And guilt. I’d infected Meg, and her mother, with my contagion, otherwise known as my life. I’d promised her that I’d keep her safe, and I’d already dropped her into the middle of this danger.
When I wasn’t with the lawyer, I was with Kensington Palace’s comms person, Jason. He was very smart, but a tad too cool about this unfolding crisis for my liking. He urged me to do nothing. You’re just going to feed the beast. Silence is the best option.
But silence wasn’t an option. Of all the options, silence was the least desirable, the least defensible. We couldn’t just let the press continue to do this to Meg.
Even after I’d convinced him that we needed to do something, say something, anything, the Palace said no. Courtiers blocked us hard. Nothing can be done, they said. And therefore nothing will be done.
I accepted this as final. Until I read an essay in the Huffington Post. The essayist said the mild reaction of Britons to this explosion of racism was to be expected, since they were the heirs of racist colonialists. But what was truly “unforgivable,” she added, was my silence.
Mine.
I showed the essay to Jason, said we needed a course correction immediately.
No more debate, no more discussion. We needed a statement out there.
Within a day we had a draft. Strong, precise, angry, honest. I didn’t think it would be the end, but maybe the beginning of the end.
I read it one last time and asked Jason to let it fly.
