Here’s a copy paste. @TheStroppyFeminist
The beautiful and the powerful of Hollywood circulated over ginger margaritas and spicy tuna bites on the rooftop of the Waldorf Astoria after the Emmy awards on Sunday night.
Guests included A-listers such as Kevin Costner, Brie Larson and Javier Bardem, influential bosses like David Zaslav of Warners, and rising stars including the actress Eve Hewson – Bono's daughter.
The party was thrown by WME, the Hollywood talent agency whose biggest boss, Ari Emanuel, is the patron of all who gathered there. He out-clouted everyone present, and considering that last year he was paid $65 million (£49 million), he out-earns most of them, too.
Missing, though, was one of Emanuel's most famous clients, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. She signed with him in April 2023 in what seemed to be a certain harbinger of some big-ticket commercial tie-ups and maybe more deals in entertainment to go alongside her existing Netflix gig. But – just three days after a brutal take-down in the usually placid industry bible The Hollywood Reporter, which labelled her as 'Duchess Difficult', neither she nor husband Prince Harry were showing their faces.
They weren't nominated for any Emmys either – obviously.
Meghan has not made a TV show since Netflix's incendiary Harry & Meghan documentary in 2022; Harry was a featured talking head in a documentary about his Invictus Games, which went out in 2023 to some of the lowest ratings of the year on Netflix.
Whether they didn't get an invite or declined to go, their attendance at the event would have made the couple appear at least sanguine in the wake of the article which talked about her working practices, saying she was 'just terrible', 'a dictator in high heels' and had 'made grown men cry'.
One senior figure, who has watched Harry and Meghan's progress in Hollywood with interest, said this week that they seem to be reaping the kind of 'schadenfreude with extra venom' at which the entertainment business excels.
He adds: 'It was only a matter of time before the industry Press started taking shots. It's hard to find anyone with a good word to say for their film and television credibility.'
The article in The Hollywood Reporter was published on September 12. Headed: Why Hollywood Keeps Quitting on Harry and Meghan, it was ostensibly about their chief of staff, Josh Kettler, leaving after only three months, as first revealed in this newspaper by Richard Eden in his diary pages.
It mentioned their woeful record in hanging onto staff with those leaving including Toya Holness, their global press secretary until 2022, Christine Weil Schirmer, who quit as Harry and Meghan's PR head in 2021 and Keleigh Thomas Morgan of Sunshine Sachs who stopped looking after the couple around the same time. Others who have left include Catherine St-Laurent, once head of the Sussexes' charity Archewell, Archewell COO Mandana Dayani; content chief Ben Browning and marketing chief Fara Taylor.
A source claimed to the Hollywood Reporter: 'Everyone's terrified of Meghan. She belittles people, she doesn't take advice. They're both poor decision-makers, they change their minds frequently. Harry is a very, very charming person — no airs at all — but he's very much an enabler. And she's just terrible.'
Another source said: 'She's absolutely relentless. She marches around like a dictator in high heels, fuming and barking orders. I've watched her reduce grown men to tears.'
The startling allegations – described by a source close to the couple as 'inaccurate' and 'one-sided' – recall the kerfuffle in 2018 over whether Meghan had bullied staff at Buckingham Palace. There was an investigation after complaints and concerns were raised, but its results have never been made public.
Meghan strenuously denied the allegations and denounced them as part of a 'calculated smear campaign'.
In all, the Hollywood Reporter article was just the kind of unflattering 'hit piece' which you might expect the talent agency WME to have strangled at birth for their client, Meghan. One senior Hollywood publicist tells me: 'First of all, everyone industry-wide, EVERYONE reads The Hollywood Reporter. It's really striking that WME did not stop this running.'
She adds: 'WME normally – you would think – would have been threatening and denying access to other stars. Was this done here?
'The only thing the Sussexes could rally with was 'no comment at this time' from a spokesman.'
And perhaps even worse it came only weeks after another take-down in an industry publication.
That was part of a feature about the 'worst deals' of the 'peak TV period' which ran on the Hollywood news website, Puck. Again, the site – run by former Hollywood Reporter editor Matt Belloni and with a quarter of a million subscribers – is a must-read in the industry.
Harry and Meghan's reported $100 million Netflix deal (which runs out next September) was mentioned in the same breath as Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who signed a mega-deal with Amazon in 2019 that has yet to yield a single minute of television drama.