If you can’t handle the heat of the free press, stay out of the US
Tiana Lowe Doescher
Video Embed
Ten days after the coronation of King Charles III in the United Kingdom, Meghan Markle and her husband, Harry, demanded headlines again when the duo claimed they were part of a “near catastrophic car chase at the hands of a ring of highly aggressive paparazzi.”
The alleged chase was not in the hills of Santa Barbara, where high-speed car chases targeting celebrities actually happen occasionally and are indeed capable of actually happening. No, the couple claims that “this relentless pursuit, lasting over two hours,” occurred in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where automobile traffic is often outpaced by pedestrians.
PRINCE HARRY LETS PRINCESS DIANA’S KILLER OFF THE HOOK FOR CASH
The chase, the pair allege, “resulted in multiple near collisions involving other drivers on the road, pedestrians, and two NYPD officers.”
The main moral of this story is that, according to every witness around the alleged chase, it didn’t actually happen. The New York City Police Department responded to the outlandish story by noting that Meghan and Harry “arrived at their destination, and there were no reported collisions, summonses, injuries, or arrests in regard.”
While Mayor Eric Adams said he was told two officers “could have been injured” because of the “a bit reckless” pursuit, he said he “would find it hard to believe that there was a two-house high-speed chase.” The very taxi driver who chauffeured the couple, their security guard, and Markle’s mother after the event said that he would not “call it a chase.”
“I never felt like I was in danger,” driver Sukhcharn Singh told the Washington Post. “It wasn’t like a car chase in a movie. They were quiet and seemed scared, but it’s New York — it’s safe.”
The cynical assumption here is that Harry and Meghan, once again bitter at the realization that they isolated themselves from the only family that made them famous, just wanted an extra 15 minutes of fame. But let us be generous for a moment and consider the possibility that ten minutes of bumper-to-bumper proximity with some photogs truly put their lives at risk.
Well, it once again raises the baffling question of why Harry and Meghan, obsessed with their pursuit of privacy and vitriol of the free press, would leave a country so censorious that it jails virtual nobodies for tweets, and instead move to one with the First Amendment?
From defamation law to hate speech law, speech that can be penalized and silenced in much of the Western World (and especially in the U.K.) is broadly protected by our Constitution. The realm of celebrity reporting is no different.
While the state of California has some limited protections for minors and preventing trespassing on or droning over private property, newsworthy celebrities who openly put themselves in the public eye — say, publishing an Oprah interview, 400-page memoir, Netflix documentary, and Spotify playlist about your personal lives — have much less legal recourse for legitimate news coverage, even when unfavorable.
Furthermore, while Independent Press Standards Organisation, the “independent” media regulator across the pond, bans paparazzi from, get this, chasing celebrities by car, it is totally legal under U.S. law. (California has a lesser prohibition on driving recklessly to pursue a celebrity.) Additionally, the right to privacy is explicitly codified in U.K. law, while in the U.S., the Supreme Court has slowly undermined the liberal contention that the Fourteenth Amendment confers any such right.
An insight into the couple’s true motivation can be found in the hagiography churned out by their de facto stenographer, Omid Scobie.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“The near-crash has prompted comparison with the fatal Paris car crash that claimed his mother Princess Diana’s life in 1997,” Scobie wrote with the highly strategic use of the passive voice. Never mind the fact that the Princess of Wales was killed by Mohamed Fayed’s drunk-as-a-skunk chauffeur, not the press.
More telling here is the fact that Harry and Meghan seem to believe that if they write themselves into their narrative as the true successors of Diana’s martyrdom, they can inherit her superstardom. Needless to say, Diana Spencer was never caught in the sorts of public falsehoods that plague her second son and daughter-in-law.