Meghan Markle and Prince Harry announced that they would be stepping down as senior members of the royal family in January 2020. It sent quite the shivers across the world, especially after it was known that there was some unsettling relationship between the Duchess of Sussex and the rest of the royals.
The royal family life isn’t the fairytale life that is projected in the media. Many unnoticed and unknown things go behind this facade of crowns and jewels. Meghan was deeply pestered by the media for invasions of privacy, baseless rumors, as well as gender and racial discrimination. One of the things she recently talked about was the ‘Royal Rota’, and she didn’t hesitate to criticize its rules and hypocrisy.
Meghan Markle Talks About ‘Royal Rota’ And How It Is Related To Social Media Accounts Of The Royal Family
Before becoming the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle was a professional actress, best known for her work in ‘Suits’. She had her own lifestyle blog, The Tig. Her Instagram page had almost three million followers. Meghan enjoyed sharing the snippets of her daily life with her fans. Her Instagram page was filled with pictures of her from recent trips and vacations, her dogs, her hanging out in Soho with her pals, etc. However, when she ascended with Prince Harry as the Duchess, the rights over her blog, her Instagram, along with her passport and mail, were not left to be her own. The Royal Palace would have taken control over them, and so Markle gave up her social media accounts. “It was a big adjustment — a huge adjustment to go from that kind of autonomy to a different life,” reveals Meghan.
Meghan was, however, allowed to join Harry, Kate, and Will on a preexisting account, @KensingtonRoyal (now, @dukeandduchessofcambridge) but that still didn’t change the fact that she’d have no rights over it. This is when Meghan explains the structure that works behind wanting to release photos and pictures of their own or their family. Talking to The Cut, she says, “There’s literally a structure by which if you want to release photos of your child, as a member of the family, you first have to give them to the Royal Rota,” or in other words, the U.K. media pool.
This rule meant that the Royals had to share the pictures of their children with the British press to be published across the tabloids. The photos were out by the media outlets even before Meghan had the chance to release the pictures herself. The tabloids had often talked about the Duchess with oblique, discriminatory, and sexist comments. Meghan calls out the bigotry played by the U.K. media press. “Why would I give the very people that are calling my children the N-word a photo of my child before I can share it with the people that love my child?” Meghan reasons. “You tell me how that makes sense and then I’ll play that game.”
The Duchess Takes Charge With Her Own Hands
Meghan and Harry launched their own Instagram handle, @sussexroyal, one month before Archie was born. Through that account, the couple decided to take charge of breaking their own news, stories, and pictures. Since then, much of the information came from the royal couple than the press.
Meghan was not ready to play the “exchange game” with the same media outlets, which did not hesitate to make vile comments about her and her child. As the two stepped down as the senior members of the royal family, they automatically removed themselves from the royal rota, and their joint Instagram handle too became inactive, since they can no longer use the word ‘royal‘. When asked if the Duchess will be returning to social media, she declined. The constant bullying by the press and public had negatively affected her mental health, and she’d prefer to stay free of that for a while now.
