Thomas Markle very ill

[Viviennemary]

I've just read Thomas Markle is in hospital intensive care. He has been treated poorly by Meghan. I doubt if the pair will have anything to say about this. Though they've always plenty to say about a lot of things. Doubt they'll be rushing to his bedside.

Yes, Dr Chandauka had to delete her social media accounts, and the charity itself had to disable comments on theirs due to the onslaught.

The BP HR investigation would have been carried out under the terms of any Civil Service HR investigation - does anyone know if they are usually made public, or kept confidential to the individuals concerned?

Hollywood Reporter column if anyone hasn't read it
https://archive.is/83jcM
As I understand it, the Sussexes have not to date taken any legal action against the Reporter. At least one further member of their communications team has left this year.

I’m fairly sure that the Palace’s bullying review revealed a whole raft of issues that they did not want made public - not just about specific people but also failures of the systems in place which should have been there to protect the staff.

More than likely @wordler. I also don't know if it could have been made public while keeping the confidentiality of staff members.

I am saying that none of us here commenting know for sure that she bullied anyone. It’s all second-hand, third-hand, fourth-hand reporting!

How come plainly stating an opinion is classed as “shaming” now? That is playing pretty low imho for the purposes of boosting your argument.

As a matter of fact I don’t remotely “admire” Meghan. How can I form a proper opinion about her when I don’t personally know her? But I think the negativity aimed at her is way out of all proportion to what she had actually done. And I know I strongly dislike media pile ons; especially those which are led by Jeremy Clarkson and Piers Morgan.

Why couldn’t they simply redact the names of the alleged victims as is common practice when reporting court cases throughout the land?

It’s not second hand news though is it as staff have gone on record and spoken to publications about how they were treated by her. I think all you are trying to do is downplay it. You don’t believe she she bullied staff but do you believe that the RF bullied her?

Because it’s possible that the inquiry found that senior members of staff were also acting in ways which compounded the bullying from the members of the family. Or that the Royal court system itself was a large part of the problem.

There’s no way they’d want that picked over by the press.

@Sleetandice533 It's a little different with court cases - there are specific rulings from the judge regarding publicity and if they are broken that person is guilty of contempt of court, with corresponding penalties.

How do we think things will unfold now between her & her father? Is there hope for real recinciliation?

Agree again, wordler; all that is indeed possible, but the only thing I'd add is that if any report exonerated Meghan I'm fairly certain we'd have heard about it

After all she said herself that "I’ve never had to sign anything that restricts me from talking" and "I can talk about my whole experience and make a choice not to"

I don’t think they let Meghan and Harry have the report. Bits of it would surely have leaked. I think they kept quiet because Meghan knows how she behaved towards staff meant there was a good chance there was something damning in there.

All this drama from the Markles - all of them - is so distasteful. It's worse than Eastenders. And there was Harry on Friday night saying his own family has more drama than Downton Abbey (although how he can classify Andrew and Sarah under "drama" I don't know). Honestly, they're made for each other. Tacky and cheap as each other. All the cosplaying of her wealthy, confident, secure, beige cashmere-clad, made-it neighbours in Montecito is and will always be undone in a flash for as long as this sort of tawdry mess follows her. She'd have done better to embrace her roots, warts and all. That would actually have been far more duchessy than this shambles. (I was musing the other day that if her plan to marry Ashley Cole or Rory McIlroy had come off, she'd be cosplaying a football or golfing WAG with as much gusto as she's cosplying a Montecito resident today, but with just as much inauthenticity!)

I can't muster the energy to work through all the layers of hypocrisy of the Markle mess, but it seems to me that both Harry and Meghan seem unchanged in their mission to dictate how profit-making private businesses that peddle in "news" and paid PR and advertising should cover, or not cover, them. Still wanting secrecy rather than privacy. Still lying when it suits them and crying victim when it doesn't. Still utterly, completely, breathtakingly hypocritical. Still trying to rewrite the rules of a game that only they are playing. They're just...idiots.

Totally agree. They’re breathtaking in their utter stupidity and lack of class.

And as I have pointed out previously, I stand by my argument that BP itself has had a history of issues with bullying, and historic rape allegations, and they are the last people who should be spreading rumours about this given that they covered up Prince Andrew’s wrongdoings for years! . It’s quite a clever tactic though. And a diversionary one!

This has got nothing to do with the BP bullying review - but you are insistent on trying to conflate it with the additional separate legally watertight investigations carried out by credible industry journals on US soil, of Meghan Markle’s US employees dozens of who witnessed or experienced her bullying and belittling of staff to such an extent that some required professional medical intervention to recover the mental injury her behaviours inflicted on them. We can all see what you are trying to do but none of us will be gaslit by you. These numerous individuals that she has bullied have spoken up about the abuse they endured on US soil and you will not shame, negate or silence their treatment.

Are you going as far as suggesting that BP have gone over to the US and groomed dozens of US citizens and employees in California to lie to different journals in order to discredit the highly litigious MM?

Your diversionary tactics however are not very clever but are very transparent in attempting to airbrush the victims and witnesses

Wow. I’m afraid your post indicates that you have really drunk the cool aid.

I’ve tried to be pleasant and explain that expressing a different opinion by no means qualifies as gas-lighting,

There is absolutely no need to be personally unpleasant to me because I prefer to look at this situation objectively. Neither of us personally know the people involved,

What more can I say? Simply that your penultimate paragraph is unhinged.

The bullying review was never going to be made public, it concerned ordinary men and women who had already been traumatised by their experience and who did not seek or warrant public exposure.

BP made it clear from the outset it would be handled internally and it was. I doubt Meghan Markle ever saw the contents.

I don’t go in for picking apart her every move or venture, she’s not that interesting or talented. She is, however, an awful woman who goes through life like a grenade, hurting people on the way. I’m sick of people making excuses for her just to advance their own bias and prejudice.

Very respectfully, my point is simply, can we wholly and uncritically support Buckingham Palace’s accusation about Meghan bullying others when we know that they covered up Andrew’s bullying and sexually harrassing staff for years?

Also, when the person who leaked the details now has a job at Earthshott and an honour.

And when no details of their investigation were published, even with redacted names.

I think these are reasonable questions to ask.

I read your earlier detailed and considered post but equally respectfully I still disagree.

BP didn’t accuse her of bullying, they responded to an accusation. I’m not sure how it was leaked, but BP shut it down quickly. They have remained silent on the matter, that’s how they operate, or did during Markle’s time. Charles has a tendency to leak and fly kites, the late Queen never did.

I’m not making excuses for how the Andrew situation was managed, but I suppose he was one of their own, a blood member of the family. Outsiders who marry in are not the same and shouldn’t expect to be treated as such. They have to serve a long apprenticeship, Meghan Markle was barely in before she was out. Despite that, it took a while for her behaviour to come to light.

Jason Knauf worked for Harry and Meghan and has remained diplomatic and discreet about his experience. That will be in no small way why he was taken on by the Prince of Wales.

never heard of the expression ‘drink the cool aid’. Google says it’s American. Everyday is a school day.

Agree with others the report was never going to see the light of day, as I suspect it exposed other royals & BP practices, in not a good light.

However if it exonerated Meghan, I’d have thought, the Sussexes would have been screaming it from the rooftops.

‘Drink the Kool-Aid’ refers to the murder and aggressively coerced deaths of hundreds of children, women and men in Jonestown in the late 1970s. It was a cult massacre. The children were given cyanide-laced Kool-Aid to drink.

I know some people find it distasteful to use the expression as a metaphor for relatively trivial matters, given that 900 people died at Jonestown including infants. It was an absolute tragedy and a horrific crime. But, the expression is nevertheless used widely online to express the idea of uncritically swallowing an ideology that could be damaging.

Not sure it fits with an observation about alleged shenanigans at Buckingham Palace particularly well.

Thank you I read about the shocking incident. I don’t remember hearing the expression before. But I’m only on MN so probably why. Or it’s just bypassed me. Most likely.

I apologise wholeheartedly for using that expression. Now I know its origins I won’t use it again.

It’s mostly an American expression really. Jonestown was in Guyana but the cult were from locations in the US and moved there. Their culture (eg the Kool-Aid that was on hand) was American; and so is this expression because of the huge coverage of the story in the US at the time.

@Sleetandice533 If you didn’t know, you didn’t know, it’s ok. It’s entirely up to you. It was a long time ago - I just happen to be so old that I remember it. I don’t think cults and coercion were very well understood back then, although an interest in psychological profiling was growing within the FBI in the US.

Obviously I respect your differing opinions Ohpleeeease.

It’s perhaps best if we agree to disagree?

I think how the leak emerged at a very critical moment is extremely suspicious and an important question to ask. And I frankly don’t understand how many people are not asking about it!

I disagree that BP have always remained silent in the past. For sure, they like to give the appearance they do. But in reality they frequently “speak” through friends or make their views known through sympathetic third parties in other ways. I think a lot of hurt and distress is caused by their methods of operating actually.

As for outsiders not being treated the same, as blood family; of course, that is bound to happen to an extent but marrying in involves a job too, even they call it The Firm, and there need to be transparent professional standards that apply both ways surely, whether you have just joined as an outsider or not. And these should be subject to external review.

I think we all put a lot of trust in the RF in handling their own staff, finances, internal enquiries, but when matters have come come to light in the past, BP and the RF have not always shown to be operating correctly, in fact they have covered up alleged criminality, so why does everyone just happily accept their side of things without questioning further?

Jason Knauf hasn’t remained that discreet about his time working with M&H; he may not have been particularly direct, but he has appeared on quite a few interviews defending the RF and I wouldn’t exactly call him objective. In fact, his 60 minute Australian interview I found to be a highly strategic choice. And he is American so will have good PR contacts there presumably? Once H&M’s reputation.was sullied in Oz, UK, and USA, the main English-speaking nations, they were essentially cancelled.

What is curious is that normally, if a member, or ex member. of the RF’s staff breaks cover, and gives interviews, say a butler or a spokesperson, they are cut off by the Palace immediately and quite ruthlessly. But in this instance, JK was given a job and an award. Does no one else find this strange? Seriously?

The RF control how their image is spun by asking people to sign NDAs, by making deals about press access, eg Andrew, Giuffre and ABC, using stories about different members of the family as leverage, leaking stories through friends and favoured broadcasters, who are then rewarded through awards, or gifts. Didn’t King Charles buy Fawcett a house in Highgate? Basically they can throw money at an issue to make it go away! Allegedly £12 million to avoid a court case in Andrew’s case.

Why are you all so prepared to believe them so uncritically?

We wouldn’t accept these standards from other public bodies that are meant to serve us. Nor would they be allowed to investigate themselves.

One thing I am very confident about is that everything will come out in the end or as my dear old Mum used to say “ it will all come out in the wash”.
Whilst i don’t wish H and M to divorce , I have no doubt that if/ when they do , the gloves will be off and the truth will out .

I see your shaming of the bullied continues. Why is it so hard for you to believe that she was guilty of this? The actual evidence is there but your blind refusal to acknowledge it is odd to say the least.