‘Duchess Difficult’ Meghan should ask who the REAL bully is, says AMANDA PLATELL 

Never shy of stealing the limelight, Meghan Markle talked to a group of young girls at an event supposedly focussing on their empowerment on social media about what it’s like to be ‘one of the most bullied people in the world’.

Well, as those who say they have witnessed her alleged behaviour since she became engaged to Prince Harry might have asked, doesn’t it take one to know one?

First, I’m not sure how the ‘poor me’ act from the privileged Duchess would have gone down with those schoolgirls in Santa Barbara, one of the poorest counties in California, where so many live below the poverty level.

Second, it can hardly be a coincidence that her heart-wrenching claims came less than a month after allegations that she was difficult with her own staff.

Meghan spoke about what it is like to be ‘one of the most bullied people in the world’

The Hollywood Reporter ran an article – much of it based on information from a ‘very high-up’ source working for Harry and Meghan, according to its editor Maer Roshan – that claimed her employees dubbed her a ‘dictator in high heels’. It alleged she was someone who ‘doesn’t take advice’, has ‘reduced grown men to tears’ and threw in for good measure the observation that ‘everyone is terrified of Meghan’.

The Sussexes hit back, decrying the stories as malicious, with one source close to the couple telling US Weekly magazine: ‘These quotes were fabricated by someone lacking knowledge of our company.’ It quoted individuals who worked for Meghan that she was a good employer, considerate of her staff’s needs, giving them thoughtful gifts – including a dog collar for a member of staff who’d just got a pooch and baby-grows her children Archie and Lilibet had outgrown.

Jolly good, but the truth is that Meghan can’t seem to get rid of these recurring accusations that she really is Duchessa Difficult – claims which began emerging soon after she joined the Firm and which both she and Harry have vehemently denied.

She reportedly behaved like a diva from the very moment she joined the Royal Family. For their wedding, she apparently demanded to wear a $13million emerald tiara. But the late Queen Elizabeth decided she couldn’t wear it – which led to a furious altercation with Prince Harry, who stamped his foot, saying: ‘What Meghan wants. Meghan gets.’ His grandmother soon put him right.

Early on, excuses were made on her behalf – perhaps she was simply a career-driven American whose manner and style was very different from British ways. What appeared to be unreasonable demands made of her staff were a matter of things being lost in trans-Atlantic translation.

Yet Meghan’s imperiousness continued to make headlines – for instance in a row over what the bridesmaids would wear at her wedding. It was claimed Meghan reduced Kate to tears, although Megs vehemently denies this, saying it was Kate who made her cry!

I’m afraid I tend to plump for the princess of Wales in any honesty contest between them.

Perhaps most damning in terms of the accusations against Meghan’s high-handed treatment of people are the ‘bullying’ allegations from Palace staff for the brief time she was a working Royal in 2018.

Since the Sussexes married in 2018, at least 18 members of their workforce have moved on

The Times newspaper first reported the claims in 2020, saying that: ‘Meghan drove two personal assistants out of the household and undermined the confidence of a third.’ It claimed that, at one point, the Duchess snapped: ‘It’s not my job to coddle people’, after even experienced aides who had worked for the Royals for years were left in tears and humiliated by her ‘difficult demands’.

Such was the concern that, in 2021, Buckingham Palace asked an external firm of solicitors to review the allegations, which Meghan strongly refuted.

The results of the investigation have been buried by the Palace, but that has not stopped former members of her staff at the Firm calling themselves the ‘Sussex Survivors’ Club’.

Never in the recent history of the Royal Family has another senior Royal woman – not the late Queen, Queen Camilla, Princesses Anne, Catherine or Sophie – been accused of bullying their staff.

Nor should it surprise us that the rumours keep on running in America, given the extraordinary turnover of high-profile staff there. Since the Sussexes married in 2018, at least 18 members of their workforce have moved on, including Meghan’s highly regarded private secretary Samantha Cohen, who was so trusted she rose to become the Queen’s assistant private secretary.

In California their highly qualified global press secretary Toya Holness left after just ten months. Josh Kettler, their chief of staff, left after just three months. Although he later said he was ‘warmly welcomed’ by Harry and Meghan and that they are ‘dedicated and hardworking’. 

Of course team Sussex continue to brief that it’s the nasty Royals who are behind all these horrid stories about her, as Harry did in his book Spare, in which he directly accused Camilla of ‘sacrificing’ them on the altar of her own ambitions.

They have claimed the British media is working in cahoots with the Palace to discredit Meghan. What utter tosh. As if the hard-working Royals don’t have more to think about, especially with Charles and Kate fighting cancer.

In Meghan’s eyes, she is always the victim – in 2020, for instance, she told the Teenager Therapy podcast: ‘I was the most trolled person in the entire world, male or female, and it was ‘almost unsurvivable’.’

And now she’s raising the topic of being the most bullied person in the world!

I’m sorry, Megs, it just doesn’t wash.

Can I suggest that in the long hours of the night in your Montecito mansion you should occasionally break out from your own sanctimony and wonder who the real bully is in this ongoing Royal psychodrama.