Am I the only one not buying Meghan’s reason for backing out of a planned speech in Brussels this week about online child safety? Her PR posse, Team Sussex, announced that in the wake of child porn allegations against her father and his subsequent arrest, the Duchess simply wasn’t “strong enough” to make the speech.
Really? But she WAS strong enough to travel to Brussels with Harry, who in recent years has carried out most of his engagements without his wife. She WAS strong enough to walk with him on the red carpet knowing the paparazzi would be there taking pictures and throwing out potentially embarrassing questions.
Wouldn’t you think the woman a Team Sussex insider insists is “emotionally broken” wouldn’t have made that journey to Brussels because it threw her right back into the media spotlight which for weeks she’s been avoiding? So, why go to Brussels at all if she wasn’t going to speak? Because in going and telling us all she wasn’t “strong enough” to make her speech, the whole event suddenly became about her – NOT child online safety.
No one was talking about the opening of The Lost Screen Memorial for children who’ve lost their lives as a result of social media harms. They were talking about Meghan – how she wasn’t “strong enough” to make her speech, how she was clinging to Harry as she walked the red carpet wearing sombre black and barely any jewellery.
Everything became about her – which was not what that trip was supposed to be about.
Whatever else anyone says about the Duchess of Sussex she’s a strong, determined woman. So why didn’t she make that speech and address the elephant in the room? Why didn’t she talk about children’s online safety and the fact that every child has a right to be safe (a big feature of Harry’s speech) including those exploited by the child porn industry?
She would have been lauded and applauded for that. Her words would have resonated and carried huge weight. Instead, she went to Brussels and just looked sad, which diverted attention from the very valid reason for their visit.
And while I have no doubt that finding out your father has been accused of possessing vast stashes of child porn is devastating, this isn’t news to Meghan. She’s known about it for SEVEN years, having received a letter containing “disturbing allegations” from her father’s first wife, Roslyn Loveless. That letter was delivered to Meghan by the Met Police in 2019 and I can fully understand that getting it back then about a father she adored may well have broken her.
But seven years later she turns up looking devastated about the allegations at an event she really didn’t need to be at as it had already been announced she wouldn’t be speaking. Does that ring true to you?
And I suppose the question Meghan still needs to answer is why she sat on that letter for seven years. Why didn’t she act on it – contact the FBI and demand they find out whether the allegations were true? Why didn’t she confront her father and ask HIM about what he’d been accused of? Why didn’t she talk to the Met Police here and ask them for advice on what she should do? Because doing absolutely nothing seems like the worst of all possible options. Didn’t she want to find out if the father she had loved was the man being described in that letter?
In October when the letter was revealed, Meghan issued a statement saying: “I’m deeply distressed. My thoughts are with the children who may have been harmed.” In which case why didn’t she act on it sooner because in the seven years she did nothing it’s quite possible those harms continued to be inflicted on innocent children.
And the question remains – why having received that letter in 2019 did she make a Netflix documentary in 2022 saying: “I’ve been a Daddy’s Girl all my life.”
She described spending weekdays with her mother and weekends with her father, who lived alone after his older children moved out. She gushed about everything he had done to help her during her fledgling acting career, including supporting her early ambitions. She talked about the close bond she’d shared with him growing up.
Why the hell would she say all that having been told he collected child porn images? So, forgive me if I don’t believe she was “emotionally broken” in Brussels this week. She’s been aware of the allegations against her dad for years and she hasn’t looked or sounded emotionally broken in public before now.
I just can’t shake the feeling about this pair that everything they’re currently doing is a big PR exercise about them – their image, their brand, their desperate attempts at playing working royals (which they’re not) and putting out whatever message suits their agenda. Sadly, Meghan’s message this week was “poor me” – which is tragic because the only message that should have come out of Brussels was about those poor children who’d been harmed or lost their lives thanks to the evils of social media.