[Image: Wikimedia Commons]
A British author is throwing shade at Meghan Markle, claiming the Duchess’s scrapped Netflix kids’ show was suspiciously similar to her own book series.
And not in a “great minds think alike” way, more in a “Hey, that’s my homework” kind of way.
Mel Elliott told the Daily Mail that Pearl — the animated series Meghan announced back in July 2021 with none other than Elton John’s husband, David Furnish, riding shotgun as executive producer — rang way too many bells for comfort. According to Elliott, the overlap with her own Pearl Power books was “too great for me to ignore.”
PEOPLE notes that the pitch for Pearl was all about a young girl who “learns to step into her power and finds inspiration from influential women throughout history.” Sound inspiring? Sure. Original? Maybe not.
Elliott’s Pearl Power books, while not name-dropping historical icons, had female empowerment and equality stitched into every page long before Meghan and Netflix made it sound like a fresh idea.
Even more eyebrow-raising: Elliott had her own animated spin in the works back in 2018. Her concept had her pint-sized Pearl kicking off each episode with a school project on a trailblazing woman before diving into an adventure.
This may sound familiar if you’ve seen the test animation for her first episode, starring tennis legend Billie Jean King, still chilling out on her social media like an unsent “I told you so.”
Elliott told the Daily Mail, “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. 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.”
“The world of arts and media are very competitive, and I’m afraid it’s quite common for powerful people to rip off the work of less well-known creatives — although I’m not saying that’s what happened here.”
In a classic case of shouting into the void, Elliott said her lawyers sent Meghan a letter via the Archewell Foundation in July 2021, followed by her own polite-but-pointed nudges to Archewell and Netflix later that year and into 2022. The response was nada. Not even a royal “thanks, but no thanks.”
Fast forward to May 2022: Netflix pulled the plug on Pearl, blaming a larger cull of animated projects. Elliott can’t help but suspect the timing wasn’t entirely coincidental.
“I am glad that Meghan’s Pearl show was dropped, and I hope that I had something to do with it. But what I really wanted was for it to have gone ahead, and for me to have been acknowledged or invited to work as a collaborator on the series.”
And in the bitterest twist of all: “Pearl was my dream project and now, annoyingly, if I reprise my own creation, it’s going to look like I have copied the idea from someone else.”
Ouch.
As the Sussex machine keeps rolling, Meghan was last spotted front row at the 2025 Invictus Games, looking as unbothered as ever while the whole saga played out online.
Elliott, for her part, kept quiet about the whole mess at the time – partly to avoid the inevitable social media pile-on, and partly because, in 2019, she was dealing with a much tougher battle: breast cancer.
Meanwhile, the Sussexes’ Netflix deal, inked back in 2020, is still churning out content at a cool reported $100 million price tag. From Harry & Meghan to With Love, Meghan (already locked for Season 2) to Polo, Live to Lead, and Heart of Invictus, the royal media train shows no signs of slowing down.
And if you thought they’d hit pause? Think again. Archewell Productions is now eyeing the romance novel Meet Me at the Lake for its next Netflix adaptation.
But for Mel Elliott, the whole thing still stings. “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,” she added.
“Neither Netflix nor Archewell responded to me when I would have loved to have contributed and collaborated.”
What a miss.
[Source: People]
