A recent royal family exposé alleges that a smear tactic approved by certain royal family members caused Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to “step away” from their royal duties for good in February 2021.
During an interview with Yahoo Entertainment, Omid Scobie, the author of the new royal tell-all book “Endgame,“ alleges that the effort enforced by high-ranking Buckingham Palace officials made a plan to defame the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in the British press in exchange for positive coverage on Prince William and Kate Middleton.
“I saw this for what it was, which was a mixed-race woman who was largely left unprotected and not defended or helped,” Scobie says. “Regardless of whether you like Meghan or not, she was still a human being and one that should have been treated as an equal to the people around her, but consistently wasn’t.”
He acknowledges that speaking out in this way is a risk.
“A lot of people I’ve known from my years of covering the royals will not see me as someone to talk to again,” he says. “And I’m okay with that.”
Scobie, who has worked as an ABC News royal commentator and former Yahoo contributor, sheds light on the long-standing arrangement the royals have with the media. The silent “pact” has helped to shape the public image of the family. Scobie hopes to “ruffle the feathers of the British tabloids” and their unspoken motivation by exposing what happens behind the scenes of the royal family.
Scobie claims the royal family always saw Middleton as the “perfect princess,” a dutiful and eloquent woman who meticulously checks the boxes for future queenhood. Until March 2019, the media left her unbothered after her 2011 marriage to Prince William, but then scandalous whispers of an affair shattered the blissful public image.
Britain’s The Sun spread a rumor about William’s alleged affair with Rose Hanbury, Middleton’s “glamorous best friend” in a now-deleted story. The rumors made it into American media. The Daily Mail attempted to downplay the rumors as mere “dinner party gossip,” but the harm was already inflicted.
Desperate to move the attention away from William and Kate, Kensington Palace’s press secretary Christian Jones was “desperate to stop” the gossip and was about to offer “scoops from elsewhere” to feed the wolves, according to Scobie. Weeks later, The Sun shifted its focus toward Markle.
“The timing was dubious,” Scobie notes.
Unlike Kate, the media was not hesitant to assert “sexist and racist stereotypes that we often see lauded against Black women,” says Scobie. When Scobie reported that Dan Wootton, The Sun’s former editor, casually dropped on TalkTV that his scoops stemmed from “within the royal family” in August 2019, no one thought to probe deeper. Who were these royal insiders? And why were they feeding him negative stories about Meghan Markle?
“Meghan was the sacrificial lamb, if you will,” Scobie said. He reasons that Markle had nothing to lose or gain, so why not make her the target? Harry raised the alarm on the negative press, convinced Jones and others were pulling the strings. Harry hoped William would do something to help, but nothing happened. The bad press just kept coming toward Markle, regarding her sex, race, business, and children.
Despite suing The Sun over their harmful coverage and tightening security for England visits (a request recently denied), Harry and Meghan remain entangled in a web their own family spun.
Source: Yahoo Entertainment
