Has Oprah dropped Meghan and Harry?

As stars came together to celebrate Oprah’s sixty-ninth birthday this weekend, there was one very noticeable absence. Best friend and confidant Meghan Markle appears to have been bumped off the guest list.

A-list megastars gathered to celebrate the TV icon’s birthday that was organized by Anastasia Beverly Hills, in unison with the brand’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Kim Kardashian was in attendance, posting some pictures on her Instagram Story with the caption, “Happy Birthday @oprah. Sharon Stone said it best last night toasting you that you mean the world to the world! Happy birthday!” Don’t worry Megs, we’re sure it wasn’t that fun.

To channel Oprah herself, is the exclusion an act of racism? Unconscious bias? Is Meghan at home crying on the kitchen floor after patiently waiting by the mailbox all weekend? It seems that Mr. and Mrs. Markle’s loud mouths are now being used against them after a series of similar incidents over the last few years.

On a more serious note, snubs like this show that the tide is turning with the Sussexes — and that the gamble that saw them trade in the lifelong duty of being working royalty for the money and fame of being celebrities hasn’t paid off.

Just three months ago I wrote in our October edition that A-listers were leaving the pair off guest lists because of their “capacity to share,” adding that celebs never know where details of their private lives might end up.

It’s easy to see why Oprah wouldn’t want the pair at her birthday shindig after Harry’s latest revelations. During his press tour for the duke’s memoir, Spare, nearly three years on from that bombshell interview with Oprah, he made her look stupid. On national TV, during a two-hour interview where the couple managed to tell seventeen lies, they planted a seed that would see the British royal family branded as terrible racists for the final years of the Queen’s life.

Oprah’s audible gasps, and her lack of pushback to Sussex’s unfounded claims, exasperated this storyline further. “Were you silent, or silenced?” became one of the most recognizable soundbites of the year. Meghan’s fake tears combined with Oprah’s sympathetic expression to stick the knife in further. The interview was not an attempt to speak truth, nor was it an attempt at reconciliation. This was Harry and Meghan’s campaign to finish off the British monarchy — and they used Oprah as a pawn.

The Sussexes were also omitted from the guest list to Barack Obama’s sixtieth birthday, which was a hotspot for philanthropic Hollywood stars such as George Clooney, Jay-Z and Beyoncé: figures that Harry and Meghan are modeling themselves off. At the time, royal watchers speculated that the Obamas pulled back because they were unhappy with the Sussexes’ very public falling out with the rest of the royal family in months prior. The Daily Telegraph wrote, “When it comes to Harry and Meghan, it seems, the former president and first lady remain firmly of the view that blood is thicker than water.”

“The Sussexes equal drama. Everybody over here is starting to realize that they never intended on having a quiet life,” a Hollywood insider says. If Meghan and Harry ever had a chance of cracking the Hollywood scene, staying silent would have been a good option. If they were ever silenced by the palace, as Oprah implied, we never noticed.