Vice TV put the special together to kick off its Vice Versa series, which aims to “give voice to radical and unapologetic points of view.”
“A lot of people view the royal family as a guilty pleasure or as a fantasy or gossip,” Vice Television executive vice president and general manager Morgan Hertzan told Vanity Fair. “But there are also really large underlying issues at play here, and that’s what we wanted to get into”—issues like the racism and sexism Meghan has faced. “To many people around the world, this is not just gossip and escapism.”
While controversy and criticism continue to swirl around Meghan, Meghan Markle: Escaping the Crown comes off as a fully formed defense of Megxit—the kind of defense that most British royal family members, glaringly, did not extend to Meghan even as she was hit with a tidal wave of social media hate and abuse.
Alibhai-Brown pointed out to Vanity Fair that, while Harry issued a sternly worded statement decrying the “outright sexism and racism of social media trolls,” Queen Elizabeth never issued her own warning about the treatment of her grandson’s girlfriend turned wife.
“If the queen had once said, in her way, ‘Hey, guys, this is my grandson and his wife. They just got married. Back off and let them build a life for themselves,’ the hounds would have backed off. But she never did. And she still hasn’t. I find that unforgivable, actually, since she has the power. They absolutely worship her in this country,” she said.
Alibhai-Brown noted that the queen seems to have been more proactive about protecting her son Prince Andrew—who has been ensnared in his own scandal, thanks to his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Following Andrew’s disastrous BBC interview—during which Andrew said he did not regret his friendship with the convicted sex offender—the queen chose to make a public appearance alongside Andrew.
“After this long, quite shameful TV interview, where you could see that this man is not to be trusted, the queen—the same queen who said nothing about Meghan—made a statement by bringing Andrew to church with her to show the world, ‘This is my son and you will not change that,’” said Alibhai-Brown. “But she never did that with Meghan and Harry. What does that tell you?”
Asked whether she thought the British royal family would ever be ready for a nonwhite family member, Alibhai-Brown said no. “You can see how they operate. Diana—and I don’t know how she had it, because she was born into a very dysfunctional aristocratic family—yet this woman had an instinctive inclusiveness. She really didn’t see differences between white and black, people with HIV and us, the poor and us.… But I don’t think this family will ever lose this…” Alibhai-Brown trailed off, struggling to find the right word. Then she put her finger on it: “The whiteness, actually.”
As for Meghan and Harry, according to Alibhai-Brown, Megxit was “the only way their marriage would survive.” When she heard Harry and Meghan announce that they would be stepping down as senior royals this past January, the journalist didn’t think, “I told you so,” she said. “I just thought, Well done. You’re taking the only step you can take in order to save yourself and your baby and find your own happiness…I think it’s a brave and bold and important decision.”
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