On the most recent episode of Meghan Markle’s podcast Archetypes featuring Paris Hilton, the Duchess of Sussex opened up about her time as a model on the game show Deal or No Deal. She alleged that the program made her feel “objectified” because of its beauty standards and claims she eventually quit in protest.
This is certainly not the first time the former actress has sought to portray herself as a victim, and there seems to be a pattern of Markle playing fast and loose with the facts in order to do so. On Wednesday’s show, Megyn opened the program with a Talking Points memo that outlined “the many lies of Meghan Markle.” Bestowing on her the title “Duchess of Duplicity,” Megyn brought the receipts to show that the one-time royal “lies regularly… about a lot.”
The Many Lies of Meghan Markle
To begin, Megyn outlined a few of Markle’s most notable lies. The tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey, for example, was full of them. A few highlights:
- She and Harry secretly married three days before their actual wedding. (not true)
- Her first child, Archie, was not going to be given a ‘prince’ title because of his race. (not true)
- She had her passport taken away from her by Buckingham Palace. (not true)
- ‘The Firm’ dismissed her suicidal pleas for help. (not true)
And then there was the case of her involvement in the ‘unauthorized’ biography Finding Freedom. After claiming she and Harry had absolutely no contact with the writers of the fawning tome, Markle was forced to admit in court that they had collaborated. That fact, Megyn noted, was “obvious to anyone who read that boot-licking embarrassing embarrassment of a publication.”
As Megyn explained, Markle claims are so dubious, “she’s had to hire a new publicity team to help work on her image,” in addition to the fact checker who is joining her Spotify podcast. That role is particularly “amusing” because “the falsehoods broadcast there so far have all been about her,” Megyn said. A couple such mistruths:
- No, the South African actor in the British Lion King production did not tell you that he celebrated your wedding with others in the streets in the way they celebrated Nelson Mandela being freed.
- No, your baby did not almost die in a fire while you were on an overseas trip. There was some smoke from a heater and your son was nowhere near the room.
“What’s the fact checker going to do,” Megyn asked. “’I’m sorry, madam, it’s appeared that you’ve lied about yourself again’ – best of luck to the fact checker working for the Duchess of Duplicity.”
Meghan Markle Says She Was ‘Objectified’ on Deal or No Deal
Markle’s latest lie came from the new episode of her podcast. It deals with her time working on the show Deal or No Deal. Given how her life has turned out (you know, marrying a prince and living in a multi-million dollar mansion in Montecito, CA), Megyn said it would be reasonable to assume that Markle would look back on that time and think, “it was super fun, it opened up a lot of doors for me, and I’m very grateful.” But that’s not how the Duchess remembers it.
On the episode she details the “objectification” she felt for having to present herself a certain way:
“Before the tapings of the show, all the girls, we would line up and there were different stations for having your lashes put on, or your extensions put in, or the padding in your bra. We were even given spray tan vouchers each week because there was a very cookie-cutter idea of precisely what we should look like. It was solely about beauty and not necessarily about brains… And when I look back at that time — I will never, I’ll never forget this one detail because moments before we’d get on stage there was a woman who ran the show and she would be there backstage and I can still hear her. She couldn’t properly pronounce my last name at the time, and I knew who she was talking to because she would go, ‘Mar-kel, suck it in. Mar-kel, suck it in.’”
– Meghan Markle
That apparently didn’t sit well with the former royal:
“I was thankful for the job but not for how it made me feel, which was not smart. And by the way, I was surrounded by smart women on that stage with me, but that wasn’t the focus of why we were there. And I would end up leaving with this pit in my stomach knowing that I was so much more than what was being objectified on the stage. I didn’t like feeling forced to be all looks and little substance.”
– Meghan Markle
Megyn found it hard to believe that Markle didn’t know what she was signing up for when she agreed to the gig. “She knew exactly what she was getting herself into on that job, and it was no surprise to her that they wanted her to look as good as possible while doing it,” she explained. “She took a job in which one’s only mission is to look tan, wear false eyelashes, and wear a skimpy shiny dress while opening a suitcase.”
And yet, Markle is acting “as if she was shocked to find out that ‘suitcase number 24’ did not actually have the nuclear codes in it that needed her deciphering, that she wasn’t going to be discussing Alzheimer’s and the chromosomal missegregation caused by the amyloid beta peptide,” Megyn joked.
Considering what Markle went on to do after her Deal or No Deal days, it’s hard to take her claims seriously. “What did she do after she fled this horrible objectifying job – did she run for Senate, go to law school, volunteer at a senior citizen facility,” Megyn asked. “No, she started a website in which she posted half naked pictures of herself… before then going to work on Suits, in which she regularly appeared in her underwear.”
Instead of the woe-is-me routine, Megyn said the Duchess could have (and should have) taken the high road. “Why can’t she just say, ‘I’m so grateful to those producers who helped make me look amazing night after night and gave me my start in acting,” she explained. “Because it’s more important to her to be a victim.”
Why Meghan Markle Is the ‘Duchess of Duplicity’
As Megyn explains it, the problem is Markle’s duplicitous victimhood. “What she is trying to con us on now is whether she enjoyed it,” she noted. “She loved every minute of it… she wanted the adulation just like she still wants it to this day.”
Exhibit A: Her pleas for privacy despite living a very public life. “’Miss I Just Want My Privacy’ now has a podcast, a Netflix show about her in production, a bio coming out by her spouse that’s about to hit the shelves, she gave a lengthy interview to The Cut of New York Magazine just the other week, worked with the authors of that book as I just mentioned, and just today was on the cover of Variety,” Megyn noted. “The ‘Princess of Privacy’ is actually desperate – desperate for publicity, to be noticed, to matter in a way she never did while ‘Suitcase Girl Number 24’ or while acting on the cable show Suits.”
And then there was her brief stint as a working royal. “It’s the same thing she did to the Royal Family… Sign up for a job you know damn well is going to require certain things of you and then play the victim when they do require those things,” Megyn explained. “She knew exactly what she was getting herself into, but, rather than just be honest about it, she’s always morally superior.”
With recent poll numbers showing the majority of Americans and Brits disapprove of her, Megyn thinks it’s going to take more than a few new hires to rehab her image. “It’s not something a new publicity team can solve, nor can any fact checker,” she said. “Only Meghan Markle can solve it.”
Her advice: “Stop with the obsessive image crafting,” Megyn concluded. “Take a step back, be quiet for a while, and do something meaningful that is not about you – then, maybe, we will feel inspired to do something other than mock you.”
You can check out Megyn’s full show featuring Mike Rowe and Greg Bluestein by tuning in to episode 415 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.