Meghan Markle made a "furious" phone call to fashion designer Roland Mouret after his staff "embarrassed" her, according to an account in Mouret's memoir that echoes elements of the bullying allegations against the Duchess of Sussex. Meghan has always denied claims she forced two PAs out of Kensington Palace while she was a working royal and her spokesperson dismissed the suggestion as a "smear campaign" when it emerged in the British press in 2021. Among the allegations was an account in The Sun of arguments arising when palace aides had to tell the duchess she was not allowed to keep fashion industry freebies.
Supporters of the duchess have long questioned such accounts, arguing they come from unnamed sources. Now Mouret's new book, I Am Roland Mouret: The Butcher's Boy Who Dressed the World, lays out his version of one such dispute, including a "furious" call from Meghan. The memoir is due out Thursday, October 22, from Quercus Publishing.
Claims Meghan bullied her royal staff are central to the palace counter-argument against major allegations that the Sussexes made against the monarchy, including in her 2021 Oprah Winfrey interview. Suggestions she was a bully were first published by The Times in the build up to that CBS tell-all. Mouret says he first met Meghan in a hotel while she was still in the TV drama Suits and the then-actress later told him she had started a relationship with a British prince, who he assumed correctly was Harry.
He writes in the book, serialized in U.K. newspaper The Times, that when Megan moved to England he arranged to have some of his dresses sent over to the palace so that she would have something to wear: "You’ll go to a lot of functions, you’ll need clothes. Do you want me to send you some now so that you’ll be ready?" However, when his team, at a later stage, asked for the outfits to be returned, he said there was an explosive response. It is unclear when exactly that was.
"Meghan and Harry’s relationship became public. Then the same team member who had sent the clothes for Meghan decided, in an honest attempt to be efficient, to call [Princess Kate’s] stylist at the palace and ask for Meghan’s dresses to be returned," Mouret wrote. "Meghan was furious and called me." "You don’t realize what you’ve done," Meghan was quoted as saying.
"You’ve embarrassed me!" "No, Meghan," Mouret said he replied. "It was just a mistake by someone who didn’t know. I know it’s not good for you and you want to do things privately." Mouret said Meghan replied, "you know now I can never wear your clothes again." He was later surprised to see her in what he considered to be a rip off of one of his outfits.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
