Stephen A. Smith is a longtime ESPN commentator, popular for his shady and humorous commentary. There are a lot of memes and GIFs of him. Smith also had a podcast, and this week, he decided to chime in on the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s Spotify mess. Keep in mind, Smith also knows Bill Simmons, the Spotify executive who called Harry and Meghan “f–king grifters” – Simmons used to work at ESPN before he was sh-tcanned for his disrespectful behavior within the network. Interesting sidenote: while Simmons has been on the record about his support of former ESPN journalist Jemele Hill, Hill is escaping Spotify too. Hill and Spotify announced they were parting ways before the Sussexes/Spotify story happened. But of course, everything always happens in a silo with the Sussexes, right? It’s never about the larger story. In any case, Stephen A. Smith decided to chat about the Sussexes, so here you go:

ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, has said the couple are only interesting when “insulting their family.”

“If Prince Harry and the Duchess of Sussex ain’t complaining about the royal family, I don’t know if anybody cares what they have to say,” Smith said on his podcast, The Stephen A. Smith Show. “… I’m not trying to dog [Meghan] like she doesn’t have any talent or anything like that. She did damn good on Suits… I love Suits. Matter of fact, I’m gonna watch it again. But what I’m saying is, you don’t really care what they have to say unless they’re insulting their family.”

Smith also addressed the critical comments made of the couple by his former ESPN colleague Bill Simmons.

He said: “I like Bill. I respect the hell out of Bill Simmons, ain’t no shade here. But Bill Simmons was going off… Bill Simmons seemed very happy they were gone.”

Smith, added “I never knew what the hell ‘grifters’ meant. So I had to look it up….In all seriousness, he’s qualified to say that. I am not, because I know nothing of them. I know nothing about their [Spotify] deal… I didn’t think that was necessary, but then again, he works at Spotify, not me. So he knows more than I would ever know about that particular situation, which means it came from a personal place.”

[From The Daily Beast]

“He works at Spotify” – which is why Simmons’ comments were so ridiculous. It’s an asinine way to do business for a Spotify executive to publicly trash two people who were under contract at his company. It’s bad management, it’s bad PR (for Spotify) and it blew up in Simmons face in real time as Spotify’s golden goose Joe Rogan hosted an hour-long conversation with one of the most despicable anti-vaxxers in America, Robert Kennedy Jr, and then Rogan spent the f–king weekend arguing with a immunologist on Twitter! I mean, y’all want to talk about grifters…

As for Smith’s comment about “you don’t really care what they have to say unless they’re insulting their family” – this has become some kind of bizarre talking point in the past week, with commentators suggesting that the Sussexes’ only thing is talking sh-t about the Windsors. Like… Meghan had a whole popular podcast that wasn’t about that? I guess Smith missed it.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.