Meghan Markle Claims She's Been the Most Trolled Person for 10 Years
Meghan Says She's Been "The Most Trolled Person in the World" for 10 Years. Let's Look at the Timeline.
She made the claim to vulnerable teenagers in Australia. But the maths don't add up — and neither does the narrative.
On the third day of Harry and Meghan's Australian tour, the Duchess sat down with young people affiliated with Batyr — a mental health organisation supporting youth struggling with online abuse — and made a declaration that has since ricocheted around the internet: "For now, 10 years, every day for 10 years, I have been bullied and attacked. And I was the most trolled person in the entire world."
It was a moment that was supposed to be about those teenagers. But Meghan, as she so often does, made it about herself.
"For 10 years, every day for 10 years, I have been bullied and attacked. And I was the most trolled person in the entire world."
Wait — ten years takes us back to 2016
This is the detail that stopped everyone mid-scroll. Ten years ago is 2016. Before the royal engagement. Before Suits had ended. Before most of the world had any idea who Meghan Markle was.
As we've explored before when unpacking what Meghan says vs what actually happened, the timeline of her public narrative has a habit of shifting depending on what point she's trying to make. The backlash she faced — real or perceived — began meaningfully in 2018 and escalated when she and Harry stepped back from royal duties in 2020. Not in 2016, when she was comfortably filming a legal drama in Toronto.
None of that is 10 years of relentless hate from day one. The public scrutiny is real. The claim that it began a decade ago, when almost no one knew her name? That's a stretch — and an important one, because it reframes her entire story as unprovoked persecution rather than the consequence of very public choices.
The pattern: make it personal, make it first
The Batyr visit wasn't the first time Meghan has redirected a moment meant for others back toward herself. We saw exactly this dynamic play out at the Melbourne children's hospital visit earlier this week — a setting that should have centred the children and their families, but which critics noted felt staged, photographed, and packaged as a Meghan moment.
Megyn Kelly, who has been vocal about the Sussexes for years, previously questioned whether their charity visits are genuine gestures or calculated image management. Her recent commentary on the Australian hospital visit frames it as exactly that — a photo op first, compassion second.
Megyn Kelly called the hospital visit a "photo op," arguing the Sussexes inject themselves into emotional situations primarily for visibility, not genuine advocacy. "When you're actually a member of the royal family," Kelly said of Harry's position, "maybe they do need to see you. You're in America now."
Candace Owens has described the couple as "inauthentic ambulance chasers," mocking what she sees as performative empathy — notably satirising Meghan's LA wildfire appearance for its theatrical quality. The consistent criticism from commentators across the spectrum isn't random hatred. It's a response to specific, documented behaviour.
The contradiction board: what she says vs what she does
This is something we've covered extensively. Her public statements consistently diverge from the documented record. Here's just a snapshot:
The father she won't acknowledge
Perhaps the starkest contradiction in Meghan's victim narrative is the one she never addresses. We've covered Thomas Markle Sr. and the disconnect that no one can ignore in detail — and it hasn't gotten any less troubling.
Thomas Markle is 81 years old. He raised Meghan largely alone after her parents divorced. He paid for her private education, from preschool right through to Northwestern University. In December 2025, he had a leg partially amputated following emergency surgery for a blood clot. He has publicly expressed that he fears dying without ever having met his grandchildren.
He has two grandchildren he has never seen. One of them is named after a place — Lilibet — that evokes the very family that Meghan has spent years publicly criticising as cold and unwelcoming. The irony is suffocating.
"I genuinely can't imagine doing anything to intentionally cause pain to my child."
She has spoken about family warmth, family love, family healing — on Netflix, in her podcast, in lifestyle content. Her brand is built on it. Meanwhile, her father is recovering from surgery abroad, hoping for a phone call.
The $2,000 wellness retreat problem
It's also worth noting the context of this Australia tour. We wrote about Meghan's $2,000-a-ticket retreat and what it reveals about who her advocacy is actually aimed at. This week's tour follows that same tension: speaking about online abuse and youth mental health while operating commercially at a price point that excludes most of the people she claims to speak for.
And as we've detailed when examining how Meghan has undermined her own brand, the gap between the message and the price tag has done real damage. People are not stupid. When authenticity is the product, inconsistency is the death of it.
The uncomfortable truth about criticism
Nobody serious is saying Meghan has never faced unfair media coverage. Some of it absolutely has been. But there is a difference between unfair coverage and deserved scrutiny — and the insistence on collapsing those two things together is the move that keeps generating backlash.
Standing in front of teenagers who have suffered genuine, often anonymous, sustained online cruelty — and claiming to be the world's most trolled person without context or nuance — doesn't just misrepresent her own experience. It potentially minimises theirs.
Critics are not haters. Questions are not attacks. And a decade of people pointing out contradictions is not the same as bullying — especially when many of those contradictions are documented, on record, and affect an elderly man who just wants to know his grandchildren.
