Omid Scobie has been living in LA for years. He co-authored the novel Royal Spin with Robin Benway earlier this year and is developing it as a series for Peacock. He barely does “royal commentary” at this point, which is probably healthier for him, but I feel like his voice and perspective are missed. When he wrote 2023’s Endgame, he really meant it – that was the end of his time covering the royals. Still, he decided to dip his toe back into the royal industrial complex when he appeared on the Pop Syllabus podcast, hosted by Christiana Mbakwe Medina. They got into the royal conversations quickly, and he had some interesting stuff to say about the Duchess of Sussex and how she represented the “one and only chance” for the Windsors to adapt to a multicultural, diverse Britain. Some of Omid’s comments:

The Duchess of Sussex’s life was always narrated through a British tabloid lens after 2016: “Whether [Meghan] did things right or wrong is kind of irrelevant. But it was all through that same lens, same kind of tabloid pen that is applied to individuals of different ethnicities and different backgrounds. And I think for Megan, she was kind of doomed from the start.

Meghan was the Windsors’ one chance to embrace diversity: “I think the arrival of Megan was like the ultimate test for the royal institution because…it was like can it adapt to a multicultural or a diverse Britain and the Commonwealth in a way that it needs to and it was its one and only chance. And we saw that in the actions that followed it failed at that. But so much of it was just about not defending her from the inevitable attacks and sort of one-sided coverage that came from the tabloids…”

The lowest common denominator: “We’ve kind of discussed to death those early days of the headlines of ‘Straight Out of Compton’ because her mom lived what 45 minutes away from Compton and somehow the newspaper connected it together or there was talk of her being raised on the wrong side of the track….I remember the Daily Mail did a family tree of hers and they called her family upwardly mobile and it was like ‘from cotton picking to’ wherever. Already, without opening her mouth, without even knowing anything about her personality, she was getting the British tabloid treatment, which is always going to be from that place of ‘if you are different, we’re going to treat you as such and we’re going to lean on stereotypes and we’re going to pander to the lowest common denominator’ – their reader.

Meghan was punished for not being awed by the Windsors: “And so when she then started to develop her own opinions and thoughts on things that kind of made things doubly hard for her. And then when it got to the point where she started speaking out because she was already a woman of color in a hallowed ancient traditional institution, the fact that she spoke up and didn’t seem deferential to it or indebted to it for this golden opportunity made people angry. It was like, ‘Well, how dare you? You’re not even supposed to be there, but you’re there and you’re complaining.’ Like ‘death to you,’ and that’s kind of how it spiraled.

[YouTube transcript, headers added and edited for clarity]

I think Scobie is absolutely correct here, across the board, but specifically about the tabloid lens affecting how people still talk and write about Meghan today. He’s also right about how Meghan was such a unique opportunity – and as we can now see, the only opportunity – for the Windsors to grow, change, modernize and become more representative. Let’s get into that last point though, because I have so many thoughts. I don’t even think it was a “deference” issue when it really comes down to it. The Windsors and the tabloids weren’t truly upset over that, because I do think Meghan tried to treat everyone kindly and respectfully. What infuriated them – and still infuriates them to this day – is that they couldn’t successfully “break” her, control her, own her and destroy her autonomy. That’s the real thread of the past eight years of tabloid and Windsor psychodrama – Meghan didn’t break, and she never needed their permission to exist and thrive.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, screencaps courtesy of Pop Syllabus’s YouTube video.