Why Does It Have to Be Meghan Markle vs. Kate Middleton?

Three weeks after Meghan Markle’s interview with Oprah Winfrey, I’m still thinking about a striking, slightly overlooked moment: when Meghan appealed to the diametrically opposed fandoms behind her and Kate Middleton. “So much of what I have seen play out is this idea of polarity,” Meghan said. “If you love me, you don’t have to hate her. And if you love her, you don’t need to hate me.”

I sat in stunned silence through most of the two-hour interview but this comment nearly made me yelp in recognition. Here was Meghan acknowledging, before an estimated 17 million viewers, a toxic dynamic that has raged online for years: the deeply divided “team Kate versus team Meghan” camps that measure loyalty to one duchess in hatred of the other. I’ve covered Meghan and the intersection of racist, sexist media narratives attacking her from their earliest days, but my Twitter mentions have nevertheless been rife with criticism from Meghan fans about how disingenuous I must be…because I have also committed the cardinal sin of writing favorably about Kate in the past.

“The polarization really is analogous to what we’ve seen in politics. None of us knows anybody who is neutral about Donald Trump,” Susan E. Kelley, founder of the Duchess of Cambridge style blog What Kate Wore, told me. “I see a lot of that with the Meghan and Kate worlds.”

Once upon a time, What Kate Wore and What Meghan Wore were sister sites, sharing each other’s logos and links at the top of each home page. But last year, after Meghan and Prince Harry stepped down as senior royals, Kelley and What Meghan Wore editor Susan Courter decided to split the sites, in large part due to increasing tension and ugliness between Meghan and Kate fans. Monitoring hateful, sometimes racist comments on Facebook and Instagram became a draining daily practice for the Susans, who remain close: “There were a couple of times we were on the phone with each other in tears because we were so exhausted,” Kelley said. Once, Kelley accidentally tweeted a Kate story from the Meghan account: “a simple human error, but people treated it as the most cataclysmic, diabolical thing that could have happened.” At What Meghan Wore, Courter began to feel she couldn’t, for example, wish Kate a happy birthday “because I’m going to get destroyed and I’m going to lose followers.”

For the extremely online, it isn’t enough to be a fan of either woman. Being a stan requires that love be mutually exclusive. The Kate-Meghan chasm “speaks to stan culture,” Omid Scobie, royal correspondent and coauthor of Finding Freedom, the 2020 book about Prince Harry and Meghan’s departure as senior royals, told me, summing up the philosophy thusly: “You’re either team Nikki or Cardi. You cannot be both.” Never mind the irony, as Kelley sees it, of bullies mobilizing behind Kate and Meghan, two vocal anti-bullying advocates: “Both women would find it abhorrent to see some of the things that are said in their names.”

Scobie is one of the most well-respected reporters in the royal ecosystem, but as a Meghan specialist, he still gets nervous to post about Kate on Twitter, “because then I feel like there’ll be a sea of voices that don’t like the fact that I focused on her.” Meanwhile, “if I write about Meghan, you can guarantee that half the profile pictures in comments underneath are Cambridge photos, all with very negative comments.” Team Sussex is often louder, he said, in response to the outsize racist abuse Meghan has faced: “There are a lot of people who feel that if they’re not sticking up for the Sussexes, then no one else is, because the [British] media isn’t, and the royal family isn’t.”

Scobie started out reporting on Prince William and Kate Middleton, documenting their first royal tours and the birth of Prince George. When his focus later turned to Meghan and Harry, he felt the blowback not only online, but eventually from within the monarchy itself: “It was only last year that someone at the palace told me that I picked my corner and now I have to stay in it.”

It’s a false choice for the subset of royal watchers who have followed both women. Kate became my gateway to modern royal obsession circa 2001, when we both met cute guys in college that we’d go on to date on and off before marrying them—in her case, with considerable more fanfare—in 2011. When Meghan, an avowed feminist came on the scene in her ripped Mother jeans in 2017, she captured my attention (as an outspoken American myself) in an entirely new, deeper way. How a biracial American woman with a fully formed life would fit—or not—into the confines of the British monarchy seemed ripe for the analyzing (little did I know). “Kate was the one I felt seen by in my 20s,” Hitha Palepu, a longtime royal watcher and author of the forthcoming book We’re Speaking: The Life Lessons of Kamala Harris, told me, while Meghan is the kind of friend she craves in her 30s: “I want to go pick eggs with her at Archie’s Chick Inn.”

The purported Kate–versus–Meghan divide has never been about the women, really, but the forces of racism and sexism working against them, a mirror held up to the unflinching British monarchy and toxic tabloid media. In reality, according to Scobie, “there wasn’t much of a relationship” between the duchesses of Sussex and Cambridge. “There was no fallout, but it was just two women that weren’t that close” and simply “didn’t have a lot in common.” But it should surprise no one that “Sisters-in-Law Quietly Tolerate Each Other” doesn’t make for a salacious headline in the rabid British press. “The bottom line of the Murdochs and the other white men who own these newspapers: There is money in drama,” Palepu said. “Even if that drama isn’t real. Especially if that drama isn’t real.”

Never mind that their husbands, Prince William and Prince Harry, were experiencing their own issues: The women, as ever, were destined to take the fall. The duchesses were pitted against each other from the start with catfight narratives, from a 2018 Telegraph report claiming Meghan made Kate cry over flower girl dresses (Meghan told Oprah the reverse actually happened), to a Sun story claiming the two got into an “explosive row” after Meghan was rude to a member of Kate’s staff (the palace issued a rare denial) and a trollish Daily Mail piece contrasting their “very” different makeup palettes at Buckingham Palace. Us Weekly got in on the action in the States, blaring “They’ll Never Be Friends” on a 2019 cover.