On Friday, Vanity Fair dropped their new cover and cover story, all about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. The broader concept of the piece is about marking the five-year anniversary of the Sussexit and assessing how Prince Harry and Meghan are doing professionally. But it hits on and feeds into all of the worst of the tabloid narratives: “Meghan the bully” and “Harry is dumb” and “their marriage is trouble.” A lot of people have been really invested in that last one for a while now. In recent months, the “marriage trouble” storyline has been built on the reality that Harry and Meghan are pursuing separate projects – Meghan has her lifestyle show and brand, and Harry has all of his charity work and Invictus. Separate careers aren’t usually an indicator of divorce, but that didn’t stop Vanity Fair from pushing this very bizarre story about how Meghan was pitching a post-divorce memoir:

A few years ago a rumor began circulating around the book world about another prospective project for Meghan. This story, which a person with knowledge confirms the broad details of, was that Meghan’s team had a conversation with a publishing house to gauge interest in the idea for a potential book. The concept, for which there was no written or formal proposal, was post-divorce. Not a general book on life after marital dissolution, or one about Meghan’s past experience. (She was married to producer Trevor Engelson from 2011 to 2014.) This book—this notion of a book, really—might center on a post-Harry divorce. Not that there was actually one in the works! Just…if this a priori divorce ever came to be, would this publisher theoretically be interested in a book that took place in its aftermath? Another source with knowledge says, “If that’s true to any degree, she would have been approached and not vice versa.” No offer was ever made, and no manuscript was produced. After all: There was no divorce.

[From Vanity Fair]

None of this sounds true at any level. First off, Harry & Meghan are fine and by all accounts, they’re deeply in love and committed to one another, their young children and their life together in California. Secondly, why would Meghan – who is notorious for keeping her business on lockdown – go to anyone in the publishing world with this kind of juicy gossip scoop when everyone knows that the information would get out. Thirdly, it doesn’t make any sense at a business or gossip level – say that Meghan considered divorcing Harry and she was thinking about writing a book about it. Meghan knows, as does everyone in the publishing world, that her memoir would be huge (it would be huge even without a divorce). She wouldn’t have to “pitch” it to any publisher. Multiple publishers would be throwing eight-figure deals at her.

The Daily Mail obviously pulled this story out of the VF piece too, and they ran it as an exclusive, with “Meghan’s friends” shutting down VF’s claims, saying: “If that’s true to any degree, she would have been approached and not vice versa.” My guess is that someone in the publishing world – probably someone at the News Corp-owned Harper Collins, IYKYK – started this rumor as wishful thinking and it has no basis in reality.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images, cover courtesy of VF.