Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have been exiled by the Hollywood elite, according to a columnist. The couple were notably absent from Oprah’s birthday which was attended by Kim Kardashian, Sharon Stone, Jessica Alba and other megastars.
“Happy Birthday Oprah. Sharon Stone said it best last night toasting you that you mean the world to the world! Happy birthday!” Kardashian wrote to Oprah on Instagram.
But Meghan Markle and Prince Harry did not attend the megastar’s party organised by Anastasia Beverly Hills. Meghan once called Oprah a close friend and confidant. While that still may be true, the Duchess of Sussex certainly didn’t attend the event.
“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,” Kara Kennedy wrote in a column for The Spectator.
Kennedy points to Prince Harry’s ITV interview ahead of the release of his memoir Spare in which he claimed the couple never said the Royal Family, or a specific Royal, was racist. This has been seen by some as contradictory following previous claims by Meghan Markle.
During a 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Meghan told the TV megastar that a member of the Royal Family had raised concerns about the skin colour of the Sussexes’ son Archie while Meghan was pregnant.
Kennedy wrote: “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.”
The event is reminiscent of Barrack Obama’s 60th birthday celebration when he invited several top Hollywood stars-turned-philanthropists including George Clooney, Jay-Z and Beyoncé, Meghan and Harry weren’t at the event.
That 2021 party took place a few months after the simmering tension between the Sussexes and the Firm exploded in the form of the Oprah interview.
READ MORE: Meghan Markle ‘thought she was going to be the Beyonce of the UK’
In her article, Kennedy quotes a Hollywood insider, who said: “The Sussexes equal drama. Everybody over here is starting to realize that they never intended on having a quiet life.”
Kennedy argued that celebrities couldn’t risk having Meghan and Harry around “never know[ing] where details of their private lives might end up.”
She added: “If Meghan and Harry ever had a chance of cracking the Hollywood scene, staying silent would have been a good option.”
However, following the release of a Netflix docuseries and Harry’s memoir Spare – preceded by several TV interviews by the Duke in the US and UK – that ship appears to have sailed.
