Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Likely Won’t Address Explosive Book Allegations, Expert Says
“You can’t respond to it all.”
If you have even a passing interest in the royal family and aren’t living under a rock somewhere, you’ve likely read about at least one of the dozens of allegations coming from veteran biographer Tom Bower’s latest tome, Revenge: Meghan, Harry and the War Between the Windsors. The subjects of the book, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, have not yet publicly commented on the book’s claims—and, says royal expert Gareth Russell, they likely won’t.
“You can’t respond to it all,” he tells Us Weekly. “If you go out answering every single book or allegation, it will consume your entire day. You won’t have spare time to devote to your own mental health and your own well-being.”
If Bower’s book is to be believed, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have already spent enough time “shackled” to mentions in the press, becoming obsessed with reading stories about themselves prior to their royal step back in 2020.
“Every night they scoured the internet to read the newspaper reports and the trolls’ postings on social media,” Bower writes. “Irrationally, they grouped the two together and fed each other’s frenzy about the media. Convinced that as champions of goodness they were being persecuted by mendacity and racism, they felt victimized by the mildest criticism.”
It remains unclear whether the Sussexes have read the book or even the headlines about it, but Russell—whose own book about the royal family, Do Let’s Have Another Drink, hits shelves this fall and focuses on the Queen Mother—says that it wouldn’t do much good to refute the accusations in Bower’s book.
“When you are as famous as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, there is going to be a lot of speculation,” he says. “It doesn’t always do anyone good in public life to always be answering and rebutting those claims.”
That said, the royal expert believes that Harry and Meghan, according to Us, “will go down in history as the people who upended the famous royal slogan ‘Never complain, never explain,’” a phrase popularized by the Queen Mother herself.
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“I think Harry and Meghan will probably be remembered as the people who bury that attitude for themselves and for future generations of the royals,” Russell says. “And that, maybe, is no bad thing.”
Or maybe Harry is saving the couple’s response for his own book, due later this year…
Rachel Burchfield is a writer, editor, and podcaster whose primary interests are fashion and beauty, society and culture, and, most especially, the British Royal Family and other royal families around the world. She serves as Marie Claire’s Senior Celebrity and Royals Editor and has also contributed to publications like Allure, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, InStyle, People, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and W, among others. Before taking on her current role with Marie Claire, Rachel served as its Weekend Editor and later Royals Editor. She is the cohost of Podcast Royal, a show that was named a top five royal podcast by The New York Times. A voracious reader and lover of books, Rachel also hosts I’d Rather Be Reading, which spotlights the best current nonfiction books hitting the market and interviews the authors of them. Rachel frequently appears as a media commentator, and she or her work has appeared on outlets like NBC’s Today Show, ABC’s Good Morning America, CNN, and more.