Back in November, Cockburn wrote an entry of his gossip column titled “Meghan Markle: America’s laziest interviewer.” While the piece may not have popular at the time, especially with Meghan’s #girlboss fans, boy does Cockburn feel vindicated now.
It has recently come to light that while many were eagerly awaiting the one-hour-a-week podcast where the duchess investigated, dissected and subverts the labels that try to hold women back, Meghan Markle isn’t exactly the workaholic boss babe she made out — and Spotify has realized.
Last week, Spotify released a joint statement with Archewell Audio, Meghan and Harry’s content creation label, announcing that “Spotify and Archewell Audio have mutually agreed to part ways and are proud of the series we made together.”
In an interesting development, PodNews has claimed that they have heard from multiple sources that some interviews on the show were done by other staffers, with Meghan’s questions edited in afterwards. Some scoop — but Cockburn reported this seven months ago.
Cockburn wrote about one interviewee, Allison, who shared a photograph of herself in front of a sign for Gimlet, the audio production house run by the ex-Obama staffers behind Pod Save America, and thanked a producer, Farrah Safarfi, for being ‘an excellent interviewer.” Yet in the show, Allison’s comments are interspersed with comments from Meghan herself.
“This isn’t the first time people have questioned whether Meghan actually speaks to her interviewees,” Cockburn wrote, all of those months ago. “After an episode with Justin Trudeau’s wife Sophie, an old Markle friend from her Suits days in Montreal, it was clear that the conversation was recorded in separate studios, as podcast producer J.P. Davidson tweeted, “Thrilled to finally share that Sophie Grégoire Trudeau was in our studio with producer Will for her interview with Meghan Markle.”
Since the breakdown of the Spotify-Archewell relationship, a leading Spotify figure, Bill Simmons, has lashed out at Harry and Meghan Markle, branding the pair “fucking grifters” after the audio company split with the couple and ended their $25 million deal.
In his podcast, Simmons claimed, “He just whines about shit and keeps giving interviews. Who gives a shit? Who cares about your life? You weren’t even the favorite son… You live in fucking Montecito and you just sell documentaries and podcasts and nobody cares what you have to say about anything unless you talk about the royal family and you just complain about them.”
Markle, who has been known for allegedly bullying her staff, doesn’t run quite as tight a ship as she did at Kensington Palace. One former Gimlet staffer let slip on Twitter that, “We did occasionally have producers do interviews, though never the main ones, and we never edited her asking questions into interviews that producers conducted.”
