bitchy | Sam Kashner denies Tom Bower’s account of Meghan Markle’s 2017 VF cover

Tom Bower’s Revenge: Meghan, Harry and the war between the Windsors was widely excerpted and discussed online this weekend, especially in the British tabloid press. I did some coverage on Sunday and Monday too, and I’ve been left with the feeling that Bower has no f–king clue what he’s doing. This isn’t “journalism” and he is making outlandish, unverified and false claims in the service of character assassination. I have no idea why his publisher even let this mess go to print.

One of the dumbest stories in Bower’s book was about then-Meghan Markle’s 2017 Vanity Fair cover. At that point, Meghan had been seeing Harry for over a year and everyone knew that they were headed towards an engagement. Meghan spoke on the record about Harry for the first time and… no one on Salt Island freaked out at all, because the palaces knew about it and had given Meghan their blessing. Bower claimed that Meghan was hysterical and freaking out, and he also claimed that VF hated her or something, and that the VF interviewer Sam Kashner couldn’t “verify” all of Meghan’s accounts of her own activism or friendships. Well, Kashner wrote a letter to the Times (which had published excerpts from Bower’s book) and here’s what he said:

Telling the truth. Buried deep within the letters section of today’s @thetimes is a note from journalist Sam Kashner, who denies biographer Tom Bower’s negative account of his experience interviewing Meghan Markle for Vanity Fair in 2017. pic.twitter.com/Y58lPLDcvw

— Omid Scobie (@scobie) July 19, 2022

Yeah. In Bower’s account, he made it sound like he had spoken to Kashner and Kashner revealed how “pleased” he was that Meghan went on the record about Harry, but that Kashner and VF editors thought Meghan lied about her history of activism and they couldn’t verify any of her claims. Which is all false. I doubt Bower even spoke to Kashner.

The thing is, in Bower’s accounting, Meghan was always “hysterically” and “furiously” calling people to complain about how they treated her or wrote about her, and absolutely none of it rings true. It all reads like Deranger Fiction, the sh-t that those anti-Sussex hate accounts write about Meghan online. One would think that Bower would know better than to, like, use hate accounts as sources?

Cover courtesy of Vanity Fair, additional photos courtesy of WENN.