Meghan Markle, who has been busy promoting her multiple projects, found herself embroiled in a new row as a new legal challenge was revealed.
The Duchess of Sussex recently launched her Netflix show, With Love, Meghan, followed by her lifestyle brand, As Ever, and podcast, Confessions of a Female Founder, with Lemonada Media.
Amid speculations that Meghan was going to write memoir, a British globally published children’s book author exposed that Prince Harry’s wife had previously stolen her idea for her book promoting the writer to send a legal letter.
Mel Elliott, 51, issued a statement in which she spoke about a copyright infringement for her book ‘Pearl Power’.
“Meghan is a feminist who sticks up for other women, so I was disappointed and confused to see how similar Netflix’s proposed show ‘Pearl’ was to my own Pearl Power who had been created seven years earlier,” Mel said in message on Saturday.
“Of course, I can’t know if anyone on her team had seen it and been inspired by it, but the similarities were too great for me to ignore,” she continued.
“The world of arts and media are very competitive and I’m afraid it’s quite common for powerful to people to rip off the work of less well-known creatives – although I’m not saying that’s what happened here.”
Mel said, “What saddened me most is that, having brought the similarities between my Pearl and Meghan’s Pearl to the attention of Netflix and Archewell, my objection was never acknowledged – neither Netflix nor Archewell responded to me when I would have loved to have contributed and collaborated.”
When Harry and Meghan left the royal family in 2020, the couple had immediately signed a contract with Netflix. One of the projects revealed by Meghan was going to Executive produce a show called Pearl alongside David Furnish in 2021.
However, the show, which was a key title in the $100m deal, was killed within a year and all traces of the show were erased from Archewell’s website.
Meghan’s animated show was going to be about a girl named Pearl who “learns to step into her power and finds inspiration from influential women throughout history”.
Meanwhile, Mel, who is also the illustrator, had written three Pearl Power books, published in 2014, 2015 and 2016. She was already in the process of turning her books into a show in 2019.
