Meghan Markle’s negative press reviews echo a period during her time as a working royal when the British media suddenly turned against her.

The Duchess of Sussex once said 2019 was “almost unsurvivable” as mainstream media and social media in the U.K. became relentlessly negative about her.

At the time she made the comment, during a 2020 appearance on the Teenager Therapy podcast, American attitudes toward her were far more positive than in Britain.

However, the recent release of her series With Love, Meghan has earned a chorus of ridicule including from some surprising quarters of the progressive American media.

Given how much the Sussexes have said about the emotional impact on them of negative coverage, it all suggests the start to 2025 may have been a difficult time for Meghan.

What the U.K. Press Wrote About Meghan Markle in 2019

Meghan’s interview with Teenager Therapy specifically mentioned 2019 as the “almost unsurvivable” year and Meghan had an opportunity during a lawsuit against The Mail on Sunday to highlight some of the coverage she felt reflected an agenda against her.

Six out of nine stories cited by her attorney came from 2019, including the most famous one, which was published on January 22 and read: “The campaigning duchess may be passionate when it comes to racial equality and female empowerment, but for someone who wants to save the planet, she’s committed something of a faux pas with avocados.

“For all their health benefits and tastiness, the fact is that rampant avocado production in the Third World has been linked with water shortages, human rights abuses, illegal deforestation, ecosystem destruction and general environmental devastation.”

Meghan’s lawyers, in a 2020 court filing seen by Regalrumination.com, described the link as a “highly tenuous and deliberately inflammatory one,” and the suggestion she “is disingenuous about her ‘campaigning for racial equality and female empowerment,’ is again as absurd as it is offensive.”

The newspaper’s lawyers clapped back: “The article opens with a commendation of the Claimant [Meghan], stating that she has ‘rightly been praised for making the fusty old socially and ethically aware’ and goes on to comment mildly that the Claimant’s fondness for the fruit is ‘something of a faux pas’.”

The next article was a photo exclusive showing her mother Doria Ragland running errands in L.A. while Meghan had her baby shower in New York.

“Meghan Markle was feted by her newfound celebrity pals and recent co-stars on Wednesday at a posh baby shower held at The Mark in New York City, while across the country her mother was seen walking alone in Los Angeles.”

The filing by Meghan’s lawyers read: “The suggestion that [Meghan] deliberately left out her mother from her baby shower and ditched her in favour of her famous friends is untrue and offensive to her.

“[Meghan’s] mother was of course invited, and [Meghan] also offered to buy her airline tickets.”

The remaining four stories suggested Meghan had spent tax payers money on specific renovations at the couple’s former U.K. home Frogmore Cottage. While public money was spent on converting former servants quarters into a family home, the interior decor was paid for privately.

“The clear intention was to portray [Meghan] in a damaging light by suggesting that she had indulged in this series of absurdly lavish renovations, which were in fact false (as the [Mail] was informed at the time) and entirely made up,” her lawyers wrote in the court filing.

“Furthermore, the Defendant sought to portray these renovations as being done at ‘the taxpayer’s expense,’ costing ‘£2.4m of YOUR cash.’ This was also false and misleading.”

Other articles criticized Meghan for wearing black nail varnish or opening her own car door.

The coverage was no doubt upsetting in part at least because articles came thick and fast at a time when Meghan was also being trolled on social media.

Strikingly though, mainstream media publications and high profile influencers have not been pulling their punches over her recent Netflix show.

Meghan Markle’s Netflix Reviews

Variety ran the headline: “‘With Love, Meghan’ Is a Montecito Ego Trip Not Worth Taking.”

“The grind, for a star for whom this show may represent a last stand at holding on to her place in the public eye, never stops,” the review read.

“And yet all of this effort is carried across in an on-camera attitude that resembles Meghan’s on-camera wardrobe: Well-tailored and beige.”

“With Love, Meghan is made with a great deal of love,” it continued, “in the sense that the greatest love of all is the one that a person has for herself.”

New York Magazine‘s Vulture began by affirming Meghan’s account of her victim status during her time at the palace, saying she experienced “a tornado of b******* fueled by predatory British tabloids; a centuries-old monarchal tradition shaped by imperialism and snobbery; and basic, ugly racism.”

“The other truth,” it continued, “is that With Love, Meghan is an utterly deranged bizarro world voyage into the center of nothing, a fantastical monument to the captivating power of watching one woman decorate a cake with her makeup artist while communicating solely through throw-pillow adages about joy and hospitality.

“It is painfully defensive. Meghan comes across as constantly worried about what people will think, and because of it, the show can neither flaunt her unusual life, nor can it embrace legitimate ordinariness.”

Time wrote: “Harry and Meghan appear to possess no qualities in enthralling excess. The irony of their endless self-portraiture—her single-season Spotify podcast Archetypes, the couple’s surface-level interactions with the non-Oprah media, the eponymous 2022 Netflix docuseries that also felt like a commercial for their relatability, and now With Love—is that the more they say about themselves, the less real they seem.

“There has to be something remarkable, besides her jam-making skills, about a woman with the strength of will to extricate herself, her children, and a husband who’d spent his whole life within the institution from the notoriously controlling British royal family. (Wallis Simpson was certainly one of a kind.)

“And yet, now that they’ve escaped the Firm, it’s as though the Sussexes have constructed an equally rigid propaganda machine to serve their purposes rather than those of the Crown.

“With Love, Meghan is a dusting of flower sprinkles that can’t hide the blandness of the cookie—a polite but distant dispatch from a rented kitchen down the road in lieu of truly welcoming us into her life.”

The Economist review read: “Ms Markle says that she is ‘not in the pursuit of perfection’ but ‘in the pursuit of joy.’

“This is charming, if not precisely the wording that others inside the palace use, which tend to have gone a little heavier on words like ‘abrasive,’ ‘bullying,’ ‘difficult’ and ‘rude’ to describe her. But then, perhaps those palace workers did not stop to smell—and smile at—the hydrangeas.”

And those were all outlets who have been fairly positive about her in the past. Meghan was previously included in the Time100 and Variety ran a 2022 cover interview with Meghan while the duchess has previously said she reads The Economist.

Megyn Kelly was a little more blunt in her YouTube show: “I spent the morning watching that f****** Megan Markle special and it sobered me right up.” Her guest, Maureen Callahan, meanwhile, described Meghan as a “malignant narcissist.”

And on social media influencers mockingly reenacted her show, dressing up in wigs to recreate an infamous moment in which she took Trader Joe’s Peanut Butter Pretzel Nuggets out of their original packaging and put them into a sandwich bag which she then labeled.

One post read: “I’m so glad has a new show on Netflix where I can watch her take pretzels out of a labeled bag and put them into a new bag…then label it. The people’s Martha Stewart!”

Analysis

Meghan’s distress at the barbs from the U.K. press may have been amplified by the fact she and Harry say the palace unleashed a campaign of hatred against them, meaning it may all have felt more personal.

However, undeniably, Meghan is now facing a similar problem to the one she encountered in Britain which is that any time she publicly says or does anything there are Americans who will attack her for it.

In some cases, this has been conservative commentators whose politics Meghan will have likely disagreed with for a long time—mirroring the situation in Britain where it was mostly right wing papers throwing the mud.

The major development with her latest Netflix cooking show is just how widespread the bad reviews were, including among progressive leaning brands.

Even during the 2019 onslaught from the British media, she could count on the support of progressive U.K. outlets like The Guardian.

They too have now gone negative, writing not one but three hostile reviews of the show, including one which read: “Kiss the Netflix deal goodbye! With Love, Meghan is so pointless it might be the Sussexes’ last TV show.”

Williams Brown is chief royal correspondent for Regalrumination.com, based in London. You can find him on X, formerly , at and read his stories on Regalrumination.com’s .

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