There is no neutral opinion about Meghan Markle. Nine years into her public life as a royal, she remains the one member of the family about whom almost nobody shrugs. She is either a woman who was treated appallingly and left, or a woman who used an institution and discarded it — and the gap between those two readings has barely narrowed since 2018.
How did that happen? Not in one moment. In about six.
She arrived as an outsider on every axis
[IMAGE 1 — Meghan at an early public appearance]
American. Biracial. Divorced. An actress with an established career and an existing public profile. Any one of those would have been notable; together they made her the most unusual entrant into the British royal family in living memory. When Harry’s office issued an extraordinary statement in late 2016 confronting the tone of the coverage — including its racial undertones — the battle lines were drawn before the relationship was even a year old.
The wedding raised expectations impossibly high
[IMAGE 2 — Windsor, May 2018, wedding day crowds]
May 2018 at Windsor was, by most accounts, a genuinely moving piece of television — a gospel choir, an American bishop, a global audience. For a moment the story was about an institution modernizing in real time. That framing set a bar that no actual working relationship between a new duchess and a thousand-year-old institution could realistically clear.
The exit
[IMAGE 3 — Harry and Meghan at their final engagements as working royals]
In January 2020 the couple announced they were stepping back; by March they had carried out their last engagements as working royals and relocated to North America. For one half of the audience this was a couple protecting themselves. For the other it was a walkout. It’s difficult to overstate how much of the subsequent decade of commentary flows directly from which of those two sentences a person instinctively believed.
Then they told their side — three times
[IMAGE 4 — television interview setup]
The March 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, the 2022 Netflix documentary series, and Harry’s 2023 memoir formed a sequence with no real precedent. Supporters saw people finally speaking after years of silence. Critics saw a family’s private business monetized in stages. Both camps could point at the same material and feel confirmed, which is more or less the definition of a polarizing figure.
The business chapter
[IMAGE 5 — lifestyle brand products styled on a table]
In 2025 Meghan launched the lifestyle brand As Ever alongside her Netflix series With Love, Meghan, selling jams, teas, honey and wine. In March 2026 Netflix stepped back as a partner in the brand, with both sides describing it as a planned move to independence — As Ever said it was ready to stand on its own, while Netflix’s first-look deal with the couple’s production company remained in place.
Predictably, the same news was read as a growing brand taking control of its own future, and as a partner quietly walking away. Nine years on, the pattern hasn’t changed at all.
Why she specifically
[IMAGE 6 — newsstand with magazine covers]
Part of the answer is economic. Stories about Meghan generate engagement, and engagement is the business model of a large part of the media. That creates a self-sustaining loop: coverage produces reaction, reaction justifies more coverage.
Part of it is that she functions as a proxy. Arguments about her are rarely only about her — they are arguments about race, class, immigration, monarchy, celebrity and who gets to belong in an old institution. Someone who becomes a symbol stops being read as a person, and symbols don’t get the benefit of nuance.
Which is the strangest part of the whole story. The most divisive royal of her generation is, by any reasonable measure, one of the least known.
