It seems the British media is done talking about Prince Andrew’s depravity and all of the crimes he’s committed. They’ve successfully deflected everything to “should Andrew be kicked out of Royal Lodge” and “look, the Windsors are doing another dumb half-measure to punish Andrew.” Another key part of Operation Deflect From Andrew is the British press’s favorite standard: attacking the Duke and Duchess of Sussex no matter what. Throughout this week, Mail columnists have been trying to keep up the attacks, even as it became abundantly clear that the monarchy has done the most to protect a serial sexual predator for decades. “But Meghan went to Paris,” they cried. “But Meghan’s business is struggling, we swear!”
Well, the Mail’s Alison Boshoff has a new exclusive: Meghan lost another staffer! Back in June, the Sussexes did a major housecleaning on their comms team, letting go of some of their comms people and hiring Emily Robinson, who used to work for Netflix (and did publicity for The Crown). I said at the time that Meredith Maines – the comms guru who was hired in February – was probably behind all of the June streamlining. Well, now it looks like Emily Robinson has left the Sussexes’ employ!
The Duchess of Sussex has parted company with her tenth publicist in just five years after a big name she poached from Netflix quit after just three months. Emily Robinson joined Harry and Meghan’s team as director of communications in June, but she has already jumped ship.
Ms Robinson was always a controversial hire as she had worked on The Crown for years – a show which aired a number of damaging narratives about the Royal Family. The final series included scenes in which the ‘ghost’ of Princess Diana appeared to speak to The Queen and Prince Charles, which many found insensitive.
One friend of LA-based Robinson, who built up a reputation as a ‘tough cookie’ at Netflix, said: ‘It was her decision. She left a few weeks ago. She’s not a quitter, so things must have been pretty horrible for her to go.’
Ms Robinson’s LinkedIn profile does not currently include any reference to having worked with the couple, but other roles which she has held are listed.
Ms Robinson is at least the tenth publicist to leave the employ of Meghan and Harry since they left the UK for California five years ago (although two former publicists, James Holt and Miranda Barbot, have been promoted into non-PR roles). Remaining on their team are Liam Maguire, director of communications in Europe, and Meredith Maines, their chief communications officer. They met the King’s press secretary, Tobyn Andreae, this summer – which is thought to have paved the way for Prince Harry to briefly see his father last month.
The couple have suffered numerous PR disasters, most recently the duchess’s surprise trip to Paris Fashion Week.
“…Most recently the duchess’s surprise trip to Paris Fashion Week…” Ah yes, the publicity disaster of “Meghan drawing global headlines for looking amazing at the Balenciaga show.” Obviously, that’s why Emily left! She was like, no, I cannot have my client getting so much attention at Paris Fashion Week! It’s far more likely that Robinson left for a better job, or maybe there’s another restructure happening within Archewell, especially with Meghan focusing so much on As Ever. I’m defending the Sussexes’ comms team FINALLY because this year, they’ve really turned things around. Some of us had begged them for years to be more responsive, and to not allow these evil f–king narratives to fester unchallenged. And this year, we saw those changes. I believe it’s because of Maines as well.
Photos courtesy of Netflix.
If they gutter rats devoted half of their attention to the disaster happening in their backyard, maybe the situation for their favorites would not be dire.
I laughed out loud this morning when I opened the DM website and this article was splashed at the very top most prominent placement. They do the most to use Meghan to deflect from anything negative about another royal, even Andrew.
I’ll also add…..With Love, Meghan is likely winding down to Insta reels/holiday specials. This publicist chica was doing PR for WLM. It’s not a scandal. The position came to a natural close. They crow that Meghan and Harry have lost “10 PR reps” but fail to mention that several of them moved to more senior roles and are still with the org. Nothingburger. Just Meg taking the heat off the royal family (per usual)
I don’t know. 3 months is a very very short time, unless it was just a temporary contract.
Yes it is short but not for project based PR. When the project ends the work ends
Meh, @ Jezz “3 months is a very, very short time” by whose standards, by the BM’s and all their minions or the Sussex deranged h8ers? Why aren’t these fcukers focusing on the one’s they’re paying their dimes for, what’s any of the Sussexes business got to do this them? How many PR personnel has the m-fcuk!ng RF and most especially WanK lost this year? Miss me with this madness.
The sure do but it will not make the stench that is the pedo go away.
The damaging narrative of the crown. Really.The last season paid homage to c and c. I thought royalists approved. The crown toned down the awful things the royals did
And made William the calm sensible one and Harry the unstable angry mess (and chose a handsome actor for William and a weird looking one for Harry). I hated The Crown for that. They bent their knee to the royals and lost all my respect.
It must be really difficult to be a publicist for the sussexxes. No matter what you do there will be a massive push back from the derangers, and even then you are rarely allowed to make a statement in response. I imagine most publicists would want to counter the negative press more directly, but it’s just not h&Ms style.
I was thinking the same thing. It must be an extremely stressful position and comm experts might be quitting out of sheer amount of work and hate that they are seeing on a daily basis. It doesn’t have to do anything with Meghan as a boss.
I don’t really think it’s Harry and Meghan’s style that’s the issue. In the past I think people were pretty displeased with how a lot of their reactions were to issues that came. I would say now though most people agree that since Meredith came on board their comms have been pretty fantastic.
Yet and still, you still get a couple hundred articles a week about them, and people writing in this article right now calling a well received, viral visit a PR disaster as if it’s established generally agreed upon fact. I would say being a publicist is difficult for that reason. The BM is invested in them always being wrong and failures and clearly have no intention of every stopping. That just has to be exhausting and contributing to burnout. It’s sad but working for them must feel like working for a White House administration.
Harry said on Colbert that he has a lot of sympathy for his comms team. It’s not an easy job because they get bombarded with requests from the press about stories made up by the British press. Ashley Hansen spoke about that too.
I doubt most publicist would think that responding to everything, including deranged articles or comments is something they should do. Part of their job is to know what deserves attention and what doesn’t. I don’t think that they would hire someone for a job that pays well only for the employee not to do the job they’re paid to do. They and those they hire would have a better idea of all the factors involved when making decisions about responses or anything else related to the Sussexes.
Haven’t they already released the statement saying that she came in for a project? So she came in in June and left a couple of weeks ago, sounds like she was there for a Q3 project. It may have nothing to do with WLM, but I would have presumed that with her experience working with Netflix she came in to help streamline the promotion between With Love, Meghan and the As Ever launch.
And now that that’s done, her contract is over. It’s interesting that she left her job weeks ago, but somehow some way this story just managed to break this week. And magically a friend that’s willing to go and speak to the Daily Mail to tell them how it had to be because of conflict with Meghan. Even though her direct boss would have likely been Meredith.
As far as them considering PFW a PR disaster, this is exactly why their articles about how terrible Meghan is, are treated as a punchline now. Horrible week for a real criminal, but no let’s talk about someone’s staffing on another continent for their private company.
People leave jobs all the time. I don’t see this as a big deal and doesn’t seem like the DM has much information except Archewell is not on Emily Robinson’s LinkedIn. It would seem that DM just mines LinkedIn for stories about Harry and Meghan’s staff.
Interestingly I don’t think Emily ever had Archewell on her linked in but had her consultancy Co listed. Maybe she was engaged as a consultant.
Without knowing reasons why Emily left- I think the royal spotlight or at least the spotlight on H&M may be even crazier than a presidents office as Ashley compared it to. Meghan’s friend deleting a video can lead to lots of articles & speculation. Typos and admin errors too. I wish our politicians got half this scrutiny. So I can imagine it’s really exhausting doing pr for H&M & Archewell & especially where some will trash every project they do no matter its merits.
LinkedIn, that infallible professional directory … which still lists my brother-in-law, who died in early 2019.
It’s up to the estate (probably your family) to close accounts after someone dies
“The couple have suffered numerous PR disasters, most recently the duchess’s surprise trip to Paris Fashion Week.“
— L. O. L.
I wonder how much more stressful a publicist’s life becomes, the moment s/he decides to rep the Sussexes. I bet the job comes with a hefty wallop of shell shock.
If keen went to Paris fashion week her ardent fans would gasp oh she is the new jackie kennedy
That line made me LOL, too. The Paris trip was a publicist’s dream come true.
Deranged. They are deranged.
They are unscrupulous greedy for money, and use every manipulative strategy to maliciously amass wealth at the expense of others. This goes down well with their audience.
It was a disaster for the RF, specifically Kate, because Meghan’s star power eclipsed those left-behinds for weeks.
You are absolutely right about that.
while such a short tenure may indicate problems generally speaking, that doesn’t seem to be the case here since it seems she was brought on for a specific length of time and the contract has run its course. I don’t think this has anything to do with the PR disaster that was Paris Fashion Week.
(okay I’m laughing at that line, i admit. what PR disaster lol.)
I do think H&M’s comms team has greatly improved since Maines came in. There is just the right amount of pushback and Meghan is using her IG very well also to push back (I’m not sure if that’s just on her own or if there is some PR guidance there.) Like when the tabloids have gone on a “they’re getting divorced” frenzy and then M just drops a picture of her and Harry looking happy and loved up.
i think in general her IG has been a very effective tool in combating the hate stories and I think the tabloids HATE that.
I don’t have IG and only catch Meghan’s posts when they’re written about elsewhere. Nothing she does is effective in combating the UK tabloids and IMO her approach is too reactionary. I doubt her team is briefing her on all the hot goss from the DM but I would like to see her out and about.
Meghan is the opposite of reactionary and that’s why stories like rumours about her marriage have been left to fester in the past because Harry and Meghan ignored an awful lot instead of answering back. Their comms has been a lot better recently and her instagram has made it hard for them to make the marriage is in trouble rumours stick anymore because of the cute pics and videos she posts with Harry. Reactionary is not a word that you could ever use to describe her though. She tends to want to ignore the bad and focus on the good.
The UK tabloids are a hot mess and are losing money. One minute they call the Sussexes a “disaster” and the next they are talking about them coming back. As far as the Fail, they have that lawsuit coming up next year if they don’t settle and many of their reporters are publicly named in the suit.
In the last three weeks alone Meghan went to Paris, was in NYC for Project healthy minds gala & summit, was in Washington for the Fortune MPW conference, was at Emma Grede’s seat at the table event in LA and last night did a talk with an author friend at Godmothers bookstore. So she has been out and about quite a bit
She’s also done quite a lot of interviews, podcasts etc this year to promote WLM & As ever so she’s been fairly visible
I mean, if you don’t have IG, then her account isnt really going to matter to you, lol. But I can tell you that there has been the slightest shift in some coverage and its because of her IG – the attacks aren’t landing quite the same way as they used to. How can you hate a woman who makes cheesy pancakes (cheesy as in cutesy, not with cheese lol) on a random saturday for her kids?
I do think she is aware of the broad strokes in the tabloids, but not every single negative article. And I think sometimes she uses her IG to push back but I also think that just being herself on her account does a lot to counter the negativity bc people get to see her for herself.
I also think this year she has been out and about quite a bit. People don’t complain when Jennifer Aniston or Angelina Jolie or Gwyneth Paltrow (trying to think of random celebs, sorry to mix JA and AJ but whatever lol) aren’t seen in public for weeks at a time.
If you don’t have IG, which is Meghan’s only social media account then you are talking out of your ass. Maybe sit this one out.
This is similar to how they (BM) acted when Samantha the Panther left after working for the Sussexes, even though it was said from the very beginning that she had plan to retire after working for the Queen for a very long time and was asked by the Queen to temporarily help Harry and Meghan for like six months. She was there even longer than the six months that the UK press and palace told us she would be there and yet the headlines when she left were that Meghan was too difficult to work for. Imagine Meghan being too difficult for someone they called “the panther” to work for, when they still haven’t given any tangible thing Meghan did to make working for her difficult, besides early morning emails. They did the same thing with Mandana Dayani when she was slated to temporarily work with them to help them start and grow Archewell. The moment she left at the time she was initially planned to leave, they wrote articles that she left because it was difficult for them to work for Meghan. Only for her to even say publicly that they still have a relationship and she even posted a gift basket of jam she received from Meghan. The media always lie about Meghan and it is a reflection of who the media is and how desperate they are to tarnish her image. The years of lies, especially obvious lies, is starting to make it more and more obvious that it was Harry and Meghan telling the truth all along about the media and their relationship with the royals. “They were willing to lie to protect the other royals, but they refused to tell the truth to protect” the Sussexes.
I think working for clients who generally avoid the media is a huge challenge for PR staff. Cycling through comms directors can disrupt the natural flow of operations, especially when directors tend to hit the reset button when brought on board.
Probably best not to comment when you don’t know what you’re talking about. The person in charge of comms is Meredith Maines. It appears that Emily Robinson, who has her own consultancy, was brought in for specific projects and completed them very well in September. There’s no evidence that she was an employee or a permanent ‘Director of Communications’. You’re welcome.
Oh, Beth. Please allow me to thank you! It brightens my day when I’m schooled on celebrity issues. Your dedication to trivial matters is highly commendable and where possible, I shall run all future posts by you to ensure that I have all the up-to-date information. Have a wonderful weekend!
Oh Wash, please don’t turn a healthy discussion into a “thing”.
But they’re not cycling through comms directors. That’s not who this article is about. They got a new comms director in february (I think?) who has been very effective at her job.
It’s interesting that ‘Wash’ makes comments that come over as ill-informed and somewhat passive-aggressive, then becomes unpleasantly defensive when challenged. And odd to castigate others for commenting on what she/he calls celebrity trivia, when they’re merely responding to her/him. Why come here with views like this? To covertly troll? Hmmm …. 🤔
Consultants typically aren’t hired as permanent employees.
For those of us old enough to understand a Seinfeld reference, it really is bizarro world with the British press. I was just thinking recently how well done Harry and Megan’s PR has been and assumed it was their new team. I don’t no enough about the internal structure of their team as to where this person fit in, but as some of you have noted, it seems she was hired for a specific project and now that that’s done is moving on.
I have to wonder if the average person in England sees through this nonsense you have a monarchy that’s rotten from the head down desperately trying to protect a human trafficking participant, but meanwhile, the media chases its tail with this nonsense…
From what I’ve heard from average people in England, they pay very little attention to the royals, it’s kind of “they’re useless but we’re stuck with them” mentality. Most probably only pay attention when there’s scandals going on. They probably read articles like this and chuckle, roll their eyes or sigh, then never give it another thought.
The comments on the DM are brutal, though. I try not to look. I think it’s getting worse, maybe to offset the Andrew thing.
It’s important to understand most comments on the fail are fake. The up votes are fake. In the old days the fail did it manually now they use bots.
Seinfeld is a huge fan of superman. The bizarr o world was first referenced in superman comic books.
Why should anyone care why this person quit, or more likely their contract ended? I hope the Sussexes continue to remain above the fray and avoid Harry’s family, or even mentioning them.
Exactly. The Daily Fail and the Royal Fails are desperate to change the subject and point fingers at someone else.
Problem with answering back is that it just creates an opportunity for the Tabs to make more money from repeating the story along with their denial of deliberately misleading their readers.
“The couple have suffered numerous PR disasters, most recently the duchess’s surprise trip to Paris Fashion Week.”
Surprise, Surprise, an outright untruth in the Daily Mail. Meghan was a star, all the evil gossip was created by the BM desperate for a story.
She was definitely the star. No offense to the new designer, but if Meghan hadn’t made that unannounced grand entrance, the show would have been a footnote in the news. Instead, it was splashed everywhere. Píer Paolo should be very thankful to Meghan.
They still aren’t over her being in Paris. The point of this inaccurate article is to dunk, once again, on her turning up in Paris and dominating the global news cycle. That said, I think this job would be a real challenge because they are more scrutinized than presidents, are constantly attacked, and have to deal with the machinations of the British royal family. All this while protecting the couple’s privacy and ensuring there are no leaks in Montecito. Not for the faint at heart.
People has it as their top story at the moment, flaming the fires.
What happened to People? BP and KP paying them more? They had a phase of being neutral and now they have constant articles bashing the Sussexes on the ray cist bitter old birdies platform, Facebook.
Clickbait. I suppose People mag is better than most, but they really do need to moderate their comments sections more effectively. About a dozen of the most poisonous accounts repeatedly run riot, egging each other on, and this means most normal people avoid going there to push back.
Distract from Andrew might also be fueled by BP influence and not just KP this time round.
People has been like this with other subjects too. They want clicks even from angry commenters.
They’re bots.
I stopped buying people .some years ago. People should stop being a vehicle for propaganda for royalists. The magazine does not fly off the shelves.
Do you know that people can leave jobs and it’s not a scandal? The British have an obsession with this because the mythos of the devoted self…er, employee, is that they never, ever quit. It’s a sickness in their society created to benefit the wealthy.
my take based on what I read and heard=this person was hired temporily to help with some project for Meghan and Harry=they never were planning to stay long term=this person has already started a new company and is planning on focusing to get it up to par and ready for business=sometime a person is hired for a specific purpose and when completed moves on=no big deal.
Another non story by the Mail. Meghan’s people have put out a clarification where they state that Emily Robinson was employed for a specific project. Emily completed the project and has moved on. If Boscoff was a decent reporter she would have checked her facts and made an attempt to contact Emily, she did not.
A PR disaster in Paris? Only in their unhinged state of mind 🤦♀️They need to focus on their leftovers back home, less than 50% public approval rate of their brf is a crisis lol.
Also Do they have limited opportunities in the salty island – people do leave jobs here as they find new opportunities you know.