When the Duchess of Sussex’s With Love, Meghan began streaming in March, Meghan was very proactive in promoting the series and spreading positivity around WLM. So much so that it took me a few days to realize that WLM was being purposefully review-bombed by American and British critics, many of whom acted as if they’d never watched a cooking show before in their lives. Well, the exact same thing is happening with Meghan’s new podcast, Confessions of a Female Founder. Her first episode dropped this week and in my media/social media bubble, everyone loved it. People are excited to listen to the next episode. COAFF is climbing many of the podcast charts (even if I don’t understand how those are calculated). But there’s another review-bombing happening right now as “critics” are trying to outdo one another with their violent hatred for Meghan pleasantly chatting with Whitney Wolfe Herd.

As I said before, I’m not interested in amplifying the hate, just as I wasn’t interested in the bizarre and unhinged commentary about WLM. It does strike me as particularly odd in the case of COAFF – within the interview, Meghan and Whitney both talk about being targeted by the press and what that kind of interest and coverage did to their self-image and self-worth. Both women spoke about how they just wanted to go into hiding at various points of their lives. There was a real point to the conversation, about how female founders and women in the public eye are treated, how their lives are torn apart, how they’re punished for not making themselves smaller. I did want to publish this one little piece from Richard Eden’s column at the Mail, in which a minor British celebrity calls Meghan self-obsessed:

Self-obsession makes the Duchess of Sussex a terrible interviewer, claims Vanessa Feltz.

Having listened to Meghan’s new podcast, the distinguished broadcaster tells me: ‘If I’m honest, it’s not very good. She needs to listen to the answers more.’

Speaking at Queen By Candlelight at the London Palladium, Feltz says: ‘Her podcast is supposed to be about women CEOs and entrepreneurs, but I didn’t learn anything from it. Meghan speaks a lot about how she met them, and herself, but she needs to speak less about herself and stick to the actual topic.’

[From The Daily Mail]

Were we listening to the same podcast? Did everyone receive the same talking points and that’s why they’re all screaming about “Meghan’s narcissism” and “how dare she have money” and “why isn’t she sticking to the topic of her own podcast?” The one thing I will say is that I loved how much Meghan talked – she didn’t just sit back and do a straight Q&A session. It was an actual conversation and I learned a lot about Meghan AND Whitney from the conversation. In my opinion, Meghan was scared of “making a mistake” during Archetypes, whereas she sounded so confident and so straight-forward in COAFF.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images, Lemonada.