Vanity Fair has a new long-read royal story called “Inside the Markle Family Breakdown.” It was not written by their in-house royal reporter, Katie Nicholl. It was written by Vanessa Grigoriadis, who gives the Markle family the full “Vanity Fair treatment.” This is the kind of article that VF used to be known for – full of bitchy tabloid details and extensive interviews with shady people. Grigoriadis doesn’t make a judgment on Samantha Markle, who is quoted extensively throughout the piece, like the tackiest, thirstiest Greek chorus of Meghan’s royal story. The point of this VF piece is that the White Markles aren’t going away and it’s all Meghan’s fault – at no point does Grigoriadis even entertain the thought that Samantha and Thomas Markle are toxic, abusive people who deserve to be cut out of Meghan’s life. Instead, the piece reads like “yeah, Samantha and Thomas are showing their asses, but what did Meghan expect, it’s her own fault!” Grigoriadis doesn’t just speak to Samantha extensively – there are unnamed courtiers, royal sources and random, anonymous friends who all provide a backing diss track. Some non-Samantha-related highlights:

Meghan isn’t the most important princess: “Even if she’s not the monarchy’s most important princess—this honor goes to the assiduously pleasant Kate Middleton, one day to be queen consort—Meghan is the princess of the moment, as transformational in her way as Princess Di.”

Meghan’s Hollywood past: “She comes from a family of acolytes of motivational speakers and reality shows (Tony Robbins and the Kardashians are touchstones), people who believe that the future doesn’t at all have to be governed by the past. According to a Hollywood source, when her star was rising she threw herself a party at her home unofficially billed as a “Sayonara Zara” party and gave away the lower- priced clothes in her closet to her guests.”

Who Meghan is below the surface: Beneath the performance, Meghan, reporting indicates, is a solitary, emotionally guarded perfectionist likely carrying scar tissue from her tumultuous background…The image Meghan created for herself was free-spirited and earthy—but not entirely consistent with who she really was, according to those who know her. “Meghan’s goal was always becoming a household name,” says an acquaintance in the television world. “She’s insanely smart and poised, but very, very guarded. She’s not a person you can actually be friends with. She’s the type of person who is best friends with her stylist.”

What happened when Thomas Markle’s melodrama exploded ahead of the wedding: The Queen knew that Harry worshipped Meghan, and also that the House of Windsor didn’t need another busted-up fairy tale. “She was very concerned that it [the Markle situation] was spiraling out of control, which it was,” says one observer. “Buckingham Palace wanted to be able to do something and be proactive and make the situation go away. It was a direction from the Queen, so her courtiers were under strict instructions to sort it out. But Kensington Palace was not singing from the same hymn sheet, and that was because the message was coming from Meghan. She didn’t want to engage and thought that she could handle it on her own.” Both palaces’ aides whispered and planned, to no avail. “There was a lot of tension between courtiers within the two royal households, and I think it just got to a point where it was stalemate and, you know, neither could move.”

Meghan does read her press, and she was trying to manage her family situation her own way: Meghan herself was handling this fracas, or not handling it. “This is her family, and no one at the palace would make a move without her,” explains Patrick Jephson, Princess Diana’s former private secretary and author of The Meghan Factor, a book weighing Meghan’s impact on the monarchy. He pauses, then adds, “In talking about Meghan, I wouldn’t say that her advisers are doing a good job or a bad job. It is one of the perks of royalty never to be held responsible for their actions.” Regardless, the observer says, “Meghan and Harry made efforts to make sure Tom was properly kitted out for the day, so that level of care was there, but it wasn’t enough care. He needed an equerry to go out there and take him back to England, put him in Sandringham or Balmoral in a small cottage where no one knew where he was, and where he would have been very happy. That’s what should have happened.”

The smear campaign against Meghan: Understanding what’s going on behind castle walls is always a game of reading tea leaves, but the posh Brits I spoke with said they’d heard that some stories were correct: Meghan’s staff is annoyed by her waking up at a Californian five A.M. and texting about various initiatives she wants them to pursue, and Meghan is callous toward staff in general. One thought it was “peculiar” that her mother was the only family member at her wedding; another even said she’d heard Meghan was dubbed “Monster Markle” at Kensington Palace. I can’t vouch for any of that, but when papers began reporting that Kate and Meghan had feuded before the wedding, and then Kensington Palace issued a statement denying a feud, I thought about Tina Brown’s comment in The Diana Chronicles, her outstanding biography of the princess: “The palace only bothers to deny something that’s true.”

[From Vanity Fair]

I remember the back-and-forth dramas ahead of the wedding and after, all related to Toxic Thomas, and I remember the articles about the “high level” palace meetings about what they could do or should do about Thomas. I understand the petty hindsight bitchery of “Meghan and Harry should have sorted out Thomas months before the wedding,” but I also think that… at the end of the day, it was always going to play out this way, or a very similar way. If Meghan and Harry had brought Thomas to England and set him up in a private apartment or whatever, he still would have been in contact with Samantha, and he still would have found a way to sell out Meghan and embarrass her. Plus, I’ve always believed that Meghan and Harry did offer Toxic Thomas the whole thing – they asked him to come to England earlier, they offered him all kinds of help, and he turned them down. He kept turning them down and then when he sold them out and they cut him off, suddenly he gets to play the victim.

Basically, I understand why a longer-read on the Markles was newsworthy, but I absolutely think the author took the wrong angle. It’s easy enough to look at Samantha and Thomas’s shameful behavior and say “well, this could have gone better” but why not look at them and say “wow, they were ALWAYS going to behave this way, and good for Meghan for cutting them out of her life”?

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