During the BravoCon 2023 panel discussion a few days ago, Real Housewives producer Andy Cohen suggested that the next franchise should be Real Housewives of Montecito, and “If we can get Meghan Markle, that would be interesting.” Stay away from her, get a job. My God. That headline was percolating through the American media at the same time as a particularly nasty piece in the Times of London by Laura Pullman. Like, the Windsors are telegraphing the fact that the king and queen’s Kenya trip was a flop and that no one gives a sh-t about Prince William’s trip to Singapore (which is happening right now!). All of the major stories in the Times, Mail and Telegraph this weekend were about Prince Harry and Meghan. Anyway, I’ll spare you the bulk of this stupid Times piece “What’s next for Meghan, the disappearing duchess?” because these lunatics are pathetically desperate. But there are a few quotes and talking points which are already being echoed in other outlets:

The Sussexes took their kids trick-or-treating in Montecito: “You get literally hundreds and hundreds of kids in costumes so I’m sure that Harry and Meghan felt that was a safe place to be. Obviously with their bodyguards with guns in tow which is not very Montecito,” says Richard Mineards, a British journalist who lives down the road from the Sussexes. “It’s the ideal time to take the kids out so they wouldn’t be recognised.”

The Samantha Markle BS: On Wednesday, Samantha Markle will be back in court in Florida launching a last-ditch attempt to sue her younger sibling for comments Meghan made in the Netflix documentary and in the Winfrey interview in March 2021. In the unlikely event Samantha succeeds, Meghan could be hauled to court, forced to testify and release private messages and emails. Samantha insists that she and her younger sibling were close growing up; Meghan has said that she grew up as an only child who longed for siblings.

Graydon Carter really has a hate-on for the Sussexes: “I would measure the duration of the marriage in years rather than decades,” says Graydon Carter, the founder and co-editor of Air Mail. “I think she has run rings around poor Harry and gotten what she wanted: notoriety, money, and a title. His usefulness to her diminishes daily.” Carter, a former editor of Vanity Fair, pooh-poohs the idea of Meghan returning to acting: “If there is a Real Housewives of Montecito show in the works, she’d be a shoo-in.”

[From The Times]

This is like the fourth time Graydon Carter has said sh-t about Meghan and Harry, for no reason. He doesn’t know them, he’s never interviewed them and yet he seems bizarrely invested in making Meghan sound like a golddigger harpy, all evidence to the contrary. As for the larger narrative that Meghan needs to do something or relaunch herself… like, one of the dumb experts quoted in this piece says something similar to what I’ve noted, which is that Meghan has left a lot of money on the table. Meghan could have gotten fashion contracts, she could be doing spon-con, she could be wheeling and dealing in a much bigger way. We thought she would be once she signed up with WME, but their strategy isn’t visible at the moment. I get that the “haters” are desperate to see her, just as her fans are dying to support whatever she’s got cooking. But we wait!

Photos courtesy of Cover Images, Backgrid.