George Clooney said Tuesday that Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, is being “pursued and vilified and chased” by the media the same way her husband’s mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, was before her death. Clooney is a friend of Meghan’s and he and his wife, Amal Clooney, attended Meghan and Prince Harry’s wedding last year.
Clooney told reporters at a Television Critics Association conference in Pasadena, California that Meghan is “a woman who is seven months pregnant and she has been pursued and vilified and chased in the same way that Diana was and it’s history repeating itself.”
Clooney specifically pointed out the publication of the letter between Meghan and her estranged father, Thomas Markle, that was published by the Mail on Sunday.
“You’re taking a letter from a daughter to a father and broadcasting it everywhere,” Clooney said, according to the U.K.’s Press Agency. “She’s getting a raw deal there, it’s irresponsible. I’m sort of surprised by that.”
Harry and his brother, Prince William, have spoken out about how their mother was treated by the press and especially by paparazzi. Diana was killed in a car accident in 1997 after being chased by paparazzi in a tunnel in Paris. At her funeral, her brother, Charles Spencer, described her as “the most hunted person of the modern age.”
In a 2017 BBC documentary, William described paparazzi who followed her as “a pack of dogs” that “followed her, chased her, harassed her, called her names, spat at her, trying to get a reaction, to get that photograph of her lashing out.
“I believe she cried more to do with the press intrusion than anything else in her life. The impact it was having on her that we would then see and feel was very difficult to understand,” William said in the documentary. “She was subjected to treatment that frankly nowadays people would find utterly appalling.”
