Reopening old wounds.
The hashtag #DuchessofTights is trending on Twitter in the U.K. after Tom Bower made some controversial new claims about Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton in his biography Revenge: Meghan, Harry and the war between the Windsors.
In order for you to understand what the heck is going on, I'm going to need to back up a little, so bear with me.
In December 2018, The Sun published a story that claimed Meghan had made Kate cry ahead of the former's wedding to Prince Harry, because of a "'stressful' dress fitting."
But in March 2021, Meghan told Oprah Winfrey that it was "the reverse," that Kate had been the one to make her cry.
Now, Bower is implying that the original story had the right idea, but while being careful to explain there's no way to know for sure what exactly happened behind the scenes.
Here's Bower's version of the events during the young bridesmaids' dress fitting for the wedding: "Since she had just given birth to Louis, Kate was too fatigued to cope with a disagreement about whether the bridesmaids should wear tights. Following protocol, Kate believed they should. The Californian was uninterested in royal tradition," he writes.
Defenders of Markle's have taken to Twitter to criticize Kate for caring about the tights policy, using the aforementioned hashtag.
In Revenge, Bower continues, "That disagreement was followed by an argument about the length of Charlotte’s hem. Kate thought it was too short, and anyway did not fit.
"Melissa Toubati, Meghan’s assistant, and the dress-fitters employed by Givenchy’s Clare Waight Keller, witnessed Meghan emphatically reject Kate’s observation. Compromise was not a trait Meghan embraced.
"The stand-offs, Kate decided, confirmed the complaints by Toubati and other members of staff about Meghan. Kate burst into tears. Kirstie Allsopp, a friend of Camilla, would later confirm that Kate was reduced to tears by Meghan bullying her staff."
(Buckingham Palace investigated the claims that Meghan had bullied staff, but did not release their findings—which many have interpreted to mean the report exonerated Meghan.)
Bower goes on to claim that Kate decided to bring flowers to Meghan in order to make up with her. "What followed can never be irrefutably established," he writes. "In Kate’s version, Meghan slammed the door in her face and threw the flowers in a dustbin. Meghan would tell Oprah Winfrey that the tears were shed by her, not Kate, and the flowers were an apology."
The waters are so muddied at this point that I think it's best none of us draw undue conclusions about what really happened. At the end of the day, only Kate, Meghan and the people who witnessed their argument know what went down.
