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.
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Why It Matters
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.
Roland Mouret's Account of Dress Dispute
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. My apologies. 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.
"I can understand if you don’t wear my stuff, but if it’s to wear a cheap copy then that’s ridiculous," he messaged her, according to the book. "Come back."
While the timeline is unclear, Meghan wore a Mouret outfit the day before her wedding in 2018. The serialization of the book does not make it completely clear whether she ever wore his outfits again after this but ends with a reply from Meghan: "I think I should come and see you."
The Existing Meghan Markle Freebies Story
The Sun ran its article about freebies on March 3, 2021, a day after the bullying allegations first emerged. The piece described tensions over clothes sent to the palace by fashion houses. The piece read: "The alleged claims are believed to include rows sparked when the former actress was told by aides that keeping clothes sent by fashion labels was against royal protocol.
"Sources say boxes of designer garments were sent to Kensington Palace for Meghan after she was unveiled as Harry’s girlfriend."
"As an actress it was perfectly acceptable to take freebies sent by fashion chains and designer labels," according to a source quoted by the newspaper. "But Meghan had to be told it was not the done thing when you are a member of the royal family."
The newspaper did not say who had designed the contested clothes but referenced a variety of labels she had worn as a working royal, including Stella McCartney, Givenchy, Prada and Chanel but not Roland Mouret.
The original bullying allegations came in an earlier article, on March 2, 2021, that was based on a leaked email from former Kensington Palace press secretary Jason Knauf.
"I am very concerned that the Duchess was able to bully two PAs out of the household in the past year," Knauf wrote, according to British newspaper The Times. "The treatment of X [name removed] was totally unacceptable."
"The Duchess seems intent on always having someone in her sights," he continued. "She is bullying Y [name removed] and seeking to undermine her confidence. We have had report after report from people who have witnessed unacceptable behavior towards Y [name removed]."
The Sussex Defense to Bullying Allegations
Meghan's primary response to the allegations was given to The Times prior to publication of its story and therefore was not a direct response to the claims about freebies specifically. However, it did set the tone of the wider Sussex perspective on the issue, including among supporters of the couple.
"Let's just call this what it is—a calculated smear campaign based on misleading and harmful misinformation," Meghan's spokesperson said at the time. "The duchess is saddened by this latest attack on her character, particularly as someone who has been the target of bullying herself, and is deeply committed to supporting those who have experienced pain and trauma.
"She is determined to continue her work building compassion around the world and will keep striving to set an example for doing what is right and doing what is good."
Meghan's friend Janina Gavankar also went on U.K. network ITV with Meghan's knowledge to argue her case and said: "I have known her for 17 years and I have seen the way that she regards the people around her and the people she works with and I can say she's not a bully.
"But I can also say that I'm personally glad that people are doing their due diligence because I also know why someone had to leave and it was for gross misconduct and the truth will come out. There's plenty of emails and texts about that."
Harry's book Spare also suggested one of the PAs referenced in Knauf's email had quit in the middle of a dispute about freebies: "She was also said to have driven our assistant to quit; in fact that assistant was asked to resign by Palace HR after we showed them evidence she’d traded on her position with Meg to get freebies. But because we couldn’t speak publicly about the reasons for the assistant’s departure, rumors filled the void."
Prince Harry and Anonymous Sources
In Harry's book Spare, he defended the couple's decision to do their Oprah Winfrey interview with reference to anonymous sources: "We chose an interviewer who was above reproach, and we didn’t once hide behind phrases like 'Palace sources,' we let people see the words coming out of our mouths."
Harry went further in denouncing the presence of unnamed sources while promoting the book in an interview for 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper: "So now, trying to speak a language that perhaps they understand, I will sit here and speak truth to you with the words that come out of my mouth, rather than using someone else, an unnamed source, to feed in lies or a narrative to a tabloid media that literally radicalizes its readers to then potentially cause harm to my family, my wife, my kids."
While Mouret's intervention cannot definitively answer the question of who was right and wrong in the conflict over how Meghan treated palace staff, it does now mean there is an on the record account suggesting tensions existed over Meghan's attitude to clothes sent by fashion houses. That firms up one part of the narrative put forward by Kensington Palace ex-staffers, though not their whole narrative.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Dan Orton and Tony Phillips.