More than a week ago, Samantha Cohen gave a couple of interviews to the Sydney Morning Herald. Cohen was a long-time aide to Queen Elizabeth II, then right as Cohen was about to leave Buckingham Palace to move into the private sector, QEII asked Cohen to stay on and work for a six-month transition period as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s private secretary. Cohen ended up staying with the Sussexes for about a year and a half. She left the Sussexes just a few months before THEY left for Canada and eventually Sussexited out of the UK. In Cohen’s April interviews, she basically left the impression that she was interviewed as part of the “bullying investigation” into Meghan’s conduct, and that the Sussexes had high staff turnover. I also got the impression that she didn’t enjoy her time working with the Sussexes but she wasn’t part of the palace-driven campaign to destroy them.

Given everything we’ve seen over the years, no one has ever provided one single piece of evidence or even an anecdotal, unverifiable story of Meghan “bullying” anyone. It’s always just vibes, racist innuendo and “she made me feel bullied” claims. No one has ever explained exactly what Meghan allegedly did or said which had posh white women sobbing hysterically or on the verge of nervous breakdowns. “She wanted a specific kind of flower at her wedding!” That’s not bullying. “She looked at me in a meeting!” Also not bullying. “She sent a 5am text to Jason Knauf while she was traveling internationally!” No mas!! Well, trust Tom Bower to try to make a meal out of Cohen’s interviews. He wrote a new screed in the Mail about how, five years after the fakakta bullying claims were created, Cohen’s interviews could breathe new life into the smear campaign:

The Duchess of Sussex’s senior royal official, Samantha Cohen, has finally broken cover on the explosive bullying claims that first rocked Kensington Palace in 2021 and still reverberate today. Ms Cohen, a loyal and longstanding former palace aide, has confirmed to an Australian newspaper that she was, indeed, among those interviewed by the Palace in the wake of complaints about the duchess’s alleged aggressive behaviour.

A small step forward, you might think, but a significant one when it comes to an episode which officials have so far swept under the carpet. Samantha Cohen is not just any courtier, after all. An intelligent, charming Australian, she had been working with the late Queen for 20 years when she was asked to undertake a challenging new assignment. In 2017, Ms Cohen agreed to help the newly engaged Meghan acclimatise to the Royal Family and life in Kensington Palace.

Her task was to persuade an ambitious, career-minded and outspoken Californian actress to embrace the Royal Family’s immutable hierarchy and rigid protocols. Perhaps it was a tall order. Certainly, I believe that Ms Cohen was soon exasperated, within six months or so, and that Meghan either disagreed with, or failed to understand, the non-negotiable elements of royalty. I also believe that members of Samantha Cohen’s team viewed this as an irresponsible self-indulgence. Both sides would blame a clash of cultures.

Could a 36-year-old with a profile adopt the British propensity for understatement? Could she ditch Hollywood’s hyperbole in favour of the Palace’s low-key, repetitive ‘no comment’? It seems not.

She doesn’t go quite so far in her conversation with the Herald Sun, but Ms Cohen does say that she stayed in her role three times as long as she had planned – because officials struggled to find a replacement for her. And that, intriguingly, when a new private secretary was eventually found, that person quit during Harry and Meghan’s tour of Africa in 2019. The Sun Herald quotes Ms Cohen as saying: ‘I was only supposed to stay for six months but stayed for 18 – we couldn’t find a replacement for me and when we did, we took them on tour to Africa with Harry and Meghan to show them the ropes but they left as well while in Africa.’

Ms Cohen also appeared to confirm that she was one of a number of courtiers who had been interviewed following a bullying complaint raised by Harry and Meghan’s communications secretary, Jason Knauf, in 2018 – and first revealed by The Times in 2020.

As I record in my book, Revenge, William told Harry that Meghan’s behaviour was unacceptable and that Ms Cohen and others had become suspicious that Meghan had never intended to give up her career and become a loyal member of the family. Did Meghan want to return to America, William wondered? As their conversation became heated, William mentioned staff complaints about being bullied by Meghan. Harry was outraged – but the accusations, whether justified or not, were a matter of fact. So was a certain level of staff turnover.

[From The Daily Mail]

“So was a certain level of staff turnover.” So if we’re using “staff turnover” as evidence of the bad behavior of royals, surely that rationale should be extended to Prince William and Kate? Their senior staff come and go rapidly, and part of the reason why Kensington Palace has been such a clownshow this year is because Kate didn’t have a private secretary for more than eighteen months, and William’s private secretary left because he didn’t want to answer to as-yet-undiscovered Kensington Palace CEO. All of the major KP staffers from 2018-2019 left in the coming years after the Sussexes exited the country. The king basically assigned a Tory handler and an ex-military guy to staff Huevo and Buttons mid-crisis this year because William is too stupid and inept to keep senior staff. The past four years have been evidence enough that Kensington Palace’s staffers are incompetent fools, and that was before Simon Case tried to run “the Meghan Special” on government staffers in Downing Street. You reap what you sow, and William and Kate have been reaping for years.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.