Tina Brown continues to have a huge problem with the Duchess of Sussex. For Tina Brown, it’s almost exclusively a problem with Meghan too – one of Brown’s biggest complaints is that everything Meghan does is dated, yet Tina also believes that Meghan is the one “in charge” and Prince Harry follows Meghan’s lead in all things. Which is a pretty dated, ill-informed, and evidence-free theory on the Sussex marriage. Last week, Brown had a bug up her ass about With Love, Meghan. Brown said, in part, that WLM “was a cultural fossil…She’s always brilliant behind the curve, Meghan. You know what I mean? This was like flashback to 2013 to the era of The Tig, her blog.” Brown said all of that and more during her appearance on The Ankler podcast. Well, Tina decided to flesh out this hot take in her Fresh Hell substack, devoting two full pages to “Everything Meghan does is wrong, because I said so!” Some lowlights from Fresh Hell:

Meghan’s perfection in Trump’s America: With her unerring instinct for getting it wrong, Meghan has come out with a show about fake perfection just when the zeitgeist has turned raucously against it. Trump’s America is a foulmouthed and disheveled cultural place where podcasters in sweaty T-shirts, crotch-rot jeans, and headphones achieve world domination on YouTube. The real person of the moment is Pamela Anderson with her proudly wan bare face. As early as 2015, the lifestyle OG Martha Stewart understood the tide was turning against over-produced flawlessness when, as she put it, she dug herself out of “a f–ing hole” of Martha hate by trash-talking her own mistakes at a Comedy Central roast of Justin Bieber. Meghan, on the other hand, has never figured out a convincing persona. Masquerading as an influencer, she’s the ultimate follower, which inevitably means she is behind the curve.

This is Tina Brown’s version of Meghan: The series Meghan should have made is the story of what a flaming flop the last five years have been. Candor at last. If she had shown us that truth, with door-slamming scenes of her shrieking “find me an effing project” at the multiple “brand consultants” revolving through her Montecito manse, and Harry conked out on a sofa in his earbuds, the British public would be clamoring to have her back.

Eight years ago: How on point with the era she seemed then, the biracial beauty who, despite bringing out the worst misogyny in the tabloid press, became a feminist influencer the world – and Prince Harry – could rush to defend. To sign on as a royal, she had to close down her successful blog The Tig, a lifestyle/female empowerment mash-up that was a strenuous knockoff of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop ethos. It presented a Diptyque candle-scented world sprinkled with celebrity girlfriend crushes, humanitarian shout-outs for fashionable liberal causes, and bath products made by women survivors of domestic abuse. Wreathed in social justice umbrage and posing barelegged in daring strapless Ralph & Russo haute couture for Vanity Fair, she was the great youth and diversity connector the House of Windsor sorely needed.

Meghan used to be super-popular: It’s worth remembering that during that blazing year of her courtship and engagement to Harry, she even eclipsed beloved, relentlessly appropriate royal icon Kate Middleton, who had succumbed without a murmur to royal pantyhose and taken five years to appear on the cover of Vogue muffled in a brown suede Burberry coat. To the discomfort of the then Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the New York Times proclaimed the newest royal couple “young, diverse and exuding cool.”

Meghan is impatient: The trouble with Meghan is, she’s just too damn impatient. Who announces a new lifestyle brand, American Riviera Orchard, and hounds celebrity friends to talk up her strawberry jam on social media, without doing due diligence on the availability of the trademark?

The Sussexes should have stuck around the UK: It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that, at age 94, the monarch clearly had only a few years more to live, at which point the family chess pieces would start to move around the royal power board. All Meghan had to do was shut up and wait. Go quiet for a couple of years, start a family, keep her eyes trained on the splendid royal real estate that would soon come up for grabs. (As it is, King Charles is so overhoused, he could sleep in a different palace every night.) The moment William ascended to his role as Prince of Wales, there would have been new global gigs and red carpet roll-outs raining down on the Sussexes’ heads. But no. Offered the Commonwealth or Netflix, the Sussexes, with naïve avarice, chose Netflix— AND a three-book deal, AND a Spotify podcast contract— forgetting the dread obligation to grind out successful “deliverables” they mostly failed to deliver. The commercial blockbusters of the Harry & Meghan documentary and Harry’s explosive memoir Spare were Pyrrhic victories that alienated the House of Windsor for good and burned the Sussexes’ London Bridge to the ground.

The Sussexes’ life nowadays: Four years later, the Sussexes’ life is now all about pretending: showing up at B-list charity galas that would have been tossed into a palace private secretary’s reject pile, making uninvited disaster tourism appearances, or going on mock royal tours that only serve to remind us they could have done the real ones with more sizzle than anyone else in the depleted House of Windsor.

[From Fresh Hell]

What I’m left with is the sense that Tina Brown is incandescent with rage that Harry and Meghan simply refused to stick around the UK to be punching bags for years in the hope that they would eventually be treated fairly. The way Brown and the British media have completely rewritten the actual history of everything that went down in 2019 and 2020 is astonishing too – it was a life-or-death situation, and the Sussexes managed to escape by the skin of their teeth. The danger they faced was in no small part to the violent and racist jealousy from William and Kate (which Tina seems to be insinuating rather than stating bluntly). Anyway, I don’t think Meghan has a problem with impatience, if anything, I wish she would launch her projects faster. In recent days, I have to keep reminding myself that these awful people are doing all of THIS over a cute little entertaining and cooking show, a show which does not mention the Windsors or “royalty” or anything like that. Meghan is just showcasing her long-time interests and her haters are drowning in their own bile.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.