Kerre McIvor: Meghan Markle's vile trolls need to desist

Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, may have been cast into the role of a life time. Photo / Getty Images

Opinion

However much Meghan Markle was warned of the scrutiny she would be under once Prince Harry put a ring on it, she could never have been prepared for the life she's living now.

Having made her own way and having established a moderately successful career as an actress in the United States, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, may well have thought she understood the perils and pitfalls of living life in the public eye.

But her baptism by fire, which began when Harry took her along to the Invictus Games in Canada, must have shaken her. Kensington Palace was forced to release an extraordinary open letter back in 2016, complaining that a line had been crossed with the wave of abuse and harassment Meghan had experienced after being linked romantically with the Prince.

They demanded that the sexist, racist trolls cease and desist. You can understand Harry's concern. He felt his own mother, the sainted Diana, had been hounded to death by a rapacious press attempting to sake the appetite of a prurient public.

A counter opinion is that Diana courted publicity for her causes and parlayed the devotion of her public into a bargaining chip to try to live life on her own terms. She lived by the sword and, ultimately, died by it. The truth, as always, is somewhere in between.

Diana wasn't the first princess in history to try to live life on her own terms within a rigid, hierarchical, prohibitively rule-bound world. Sisi, Empress consort of Austria in the 19th century, made a disastrous marriage to a dull, plodding older husband and loathed the formality of the Hapsburg Court. She feuded with her strong-willed mother in law, and was a highly strung complicated world-renowned beauty with a passion for fashion.

She was obsessed about keeping her looks and her slim figure and developed an eating disorder, and after a most unhappy life she was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist at the age of 60.

Neither Diana nor Sisi were the fairy-tale princesses the public demanded them to be. They were real-life, living and breathing women with their own desires and their own troubles and their own agendas.

And while Meghan may have been cast into the role of a life time when she said yes to her prince, she, too, is trying to live a real life. Trying to forge a relationship that will last a lifetime, trying to use her privilege to do some good in the world, trying to enjoy growing the baby inside her. But the world will not let her be.

The vile trolling of the Duchess and of her sister-in-law Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, became so toxic that Kensington Palace again found itself appealing to the better nature of the public. It hasn't worked.

Trolls have formed themselves into different camps, Team Catherine and Team Meghan, although the nastiest and most vociferous have formed themselves into the Anti-Meghan Camp.

Their spiteful, illiterate, racist and downright deranged abuse of the pregnant Duchess extends to a fanciful narrative where Meghan isn't pregnant at all. I'm not going to repeat the disgusting comments because they don't deserve any light or oxygen – but having to deal with policing that garbage would take its toll.

To that extent, the social media team at Kensington Palace, hopelessly understaffed and under-prepared for how truly nasty people can be, is like a micro version of Facebook. Facebook is desperately trying to keep up with policing the depraved and violent posts that the sickest among us feel free to post but with more than half a million posts a minute appearing on the social media platform, it's impossible to keep up with that amount of traffic – and that amount of filth.

I hope to heavens the Duchess of Sussex is protected from the worst of what is written. But I rather fear not. Like the princesses before her, she doesn't want to live in a bubble apart from the rest of the world. She wants to belong to the real world – as does her husband.

But the world can be a brutal and ugly place. Her only crime is having a man of great privilege fall desperately, lip bitingly in love with her. Clearly there are many unhappy people in the world who resent her being the object of that devotion and they are determined to make her pay. I shudder to think what the vicious, bullying trolls believe that price should be.

•Kerre McIvor Mornings, Newstalk ZB, weekdays 9am-12pm.