Revenge by Tom Bower

[Lilybetsey]

I know this is a few years old now. I've just started listening to it on audible. It's brutal in its examination on Meghans career hustling / using people / behaviour and I haven't got to the part where she meets Harry yet.

Is this stuff really true ? I'm no Meghan fan, and I detest the way she and Harry have lied and slandered the RF especially Catherine, but this is almost unbelievably bad in its assessment of her character, her ruthless ambition and her plotting.

What do others think?

Well she hasn’t sued Bower 🤷‍♀️.
But I know what you mean !

I read it and really enjoyed it. He’s not to everyone’s liking but he’s written about some pretty eminent people and never been sued. Which means that his sources are pretty impeccable.
At the time it was published a YouTuber I love called HG Tudor, who talks about narcissism, picked apart each chapter. So I spent lots of time in the garden reading a chapter and listening to the analysis.
If even half of it’s true she sounds a nightmare… the stuff about the way she treated the crew on those commercial photos in Canada, her partner who was the chef, poor old Trevor.
I have just read Tom’s book on the Beckhams which was far bitchier and not as good as previous efforts. He clearly can’t stand them, and I quite like them, so that is just my point of view.
The Harry and Meghan wedding stuff is dynamite - the flowers, the dresses, nothing fitted, it sounded like hell.
I enjoyed it as a bit of an entertaining read and it was better than ‘Spare’ which I paid 99p for and wanted a refund on. It was like wading through treacle.
And finally I want to know in even finer details what happened with Rory McIlroy the golfer. I bet he has a few golf clubhouse stories to tell….

I bet it includes a few hole in ones 😂

I find Tom Bower comes across like Angela Levin does. He does like Meghan and interprets everything incident or fact he writes about in a way which casts her in the worst possible light.

He is also careful though to say just enough to make it hard to sue him. He is a nasty gossip, a mirror of Bouzy.

There must be MN threads from the time of publication discussing it all - they would be an interesting retrospective read. I suspect theres lots of hyperbole but one wonders about smoke/fire and consistent grains of truth?

Courtiers by Valentine Lowe seemed a more balanced / nuanced review in the broader context of the rest of the RF and the firm.

It's a good read. I think he has a grudging admiration for Meghan's hustle and rise to infamy. However, much of his source material comes from Thomas Markle, and I have come to the conclusion that the entire Markle clan is rotten to the core. I don't believe the dynamic they play out in public is real, and I am not convinced that the estrangement with Meghan is what we have been led to believe.

I don't believe the dynamic they play out in public is real, and I am not convinced that the estrangement with Meghan is what we have been led to believe.

What do mean by this? That SM exaggerates for money...?

I always thought that her half siblings were already very distant from her and had no real relationship - maybe only that they were intensly jealous of the opportunities she was afforded and they were not. I understand that they were uprooted from life far away and their mothers care as her home was dysfunctional and TM took them in as teens to raise alone. Seems he did the same with MM as her mother was out of the picture for a significant part of her childhood. Quite an unusal situation especially as he had I imagine a time consuming and demanding career?

You need to look back through all their many interviews and all the contradictory information contained in them. And they have contradicted themselves and each other a lot. They talk a lot, but have nothing to say. They can't or won't answer basic questions about what was going on in MM's childhood years, so large question marks remain over things that shouldn't be a mystery, eg, where was Doria? They are complete grifters, and the apples didn't fall far from the tree.

the only truth is in the files of the security services or the people directly, everything else is at best educated guessing

I'm not sure what to make of Tom Bower now, he was always known for his caustic approach to biographies of people and his USP was that he was a very careful researcher who had never been sued which bolstered his credibility.

Something odd happened to his whole demeanor while writing that book about Meghan. He wasn't overtly critical of her before, way more balanced in interviews etc, but through the research, writing and publication stages he became more and more extreme in his opinions about her - almost Piers Morgan like but not quite.

I don't know if the things he uncovered, including things he says he can't print because he can't get it through the lawyers yet affected him.

Or whether he was reacting to the attacks he was getting from the start from the Sussex Squad gang and that turned him against her.

Or he just liked the extra attention and notoriety he was getting for being a Meghan critic but I find it hard to listen to him now he comes across as very biased.

Meghan would have died if it weren't true. That couple are so litigious.

So clearly it's all true.

*sued not died!

Once you are known as litigious, then people will make assumptions that everything that is not challenged must be true.

This is very much the case here. They can't blame the Palace for inaction this time, as it was published very much after they left. But she has not challenged any part of it herself.

Not just litigious but M&H obsessively read the press and clap back at all sorts of ridiculous minor snubs and stories - ie. not being invited to the Duke of Westminster's wedding.

Harry has lawsuits that are a complete hiding to nothing because he just doesn't like being told no.

So you have to think that anything that damaging that they allow to go completely unchallenged has to be pretty accurate.

Whilst Revenge is good background reading, so much has happened since it was published, so much contrary information and behaviour has come out, things that don't add up. There are some online people who have looked at it all thoroughly. I'll post a couple of links if anyone wants them. Take them as you like, I'm not endorsing anyone, but the info therein is from the words of the Sussexes/Markles themselves. A lot of the accusations of "bullying" are more often than not people looking at the holes in their stories.

It will be interesting to hear what T Bower and V Low have to say on The Hollywood Reporter article and follow up interview.

A lot of the accusations of "bullying" are more often than not people looking at the holes in their stories.

What do you mean by this @Crabbyappletree ? I would like to see links if you are happy to share?

I'm enjoying to pointing out of the many contradictions in their own stories. How they have described an event in one way on one occasion, and then totally another when talking to someone else.
I also like the inclusion of some balanced reporting such as Patrick Jephson (Diana's private secretary) criticising BP for not doing more to support Meghan.
But overall, and I'm not finished yet, it takes the pair of them apart for lying & hypocrisy, and Meghan for blatantly using and discarding people. It is also quite evident she never had any intention of staying in the UK or being a member of 'Team Family': she was out for herself and only herself right from the start.

Yes I was confused reading it, as Bower's reputation for careful checking & balance seemed to have deserted him. There was a lot that made her seem fussy and diva-ish, but he was making her out to be practically the devil incarnate, planning to dominate the world. He would have much better spent his energy on a similar expose to Al Fayed etc, someone who caused serious harm. Why dud he fixate on someone as minor (comparatively) as Meghan? The foundations are dodgy, he should've looked into those but ignored the gossip, it made the book pretty trivial imo.
A lot of the facts were from the Markles, who seen as dodgy as Meghan. And if Meghan is hiding stuff about Doria, isn't that understandable? There's no obligation for her to say if Doria has something illegal in her past, or wasn't really there. I feel quite sorry for her. Yes she's probs a nightmare boss, and rather self-obsessed, but the vitriol is totally our of proportion.
Other facts seemed questionable sometimes. One little one that stuck out to me was that Meghan reportedly befriended a Bolivian president's son at secondary school, & boasted she'd be Queen of Bolivia. But her school was all-girls- did he come on a visit or something? Minor, but it seemed incongruous somehow.