Friend’s betrayal of Meghan Markle is worse than lover’s kiss and tell
NINAKI PRIDDY says she and Meghan Markle were “like sisters” for three decades and she’s not the sort of person to easily betray a friend.
And the band played Believe It If You Like, as my old grandma used to say.
For Ninaki has spilled just about every intimate bean of her childhood friendship with Prince Harry’s intended, including details of supposedly private conversations, inner sanctum photographs spanning two decades and, the latest, a candid home video in which a then 18-year-old Meghan confided that she wasn’t on the best terms with her father.
Leading me to conclude that if Ninaki considers herself to be Meghan’s “friend”, then I’d hate to meet her enemies.
When once-loving relationships between two consenting adults hit the buffers, it’s often the case that, propelled by bitterness, one of them lashes out by betraying certain confidences shared during their time together.
But female friendship — particularly when it dates back to early childhood — is a sacred thing, a vessel into which we pour all our hopes, dreams, desires and woes on the deeply precious understanding that it will never jump up and bite us.
If and when it does, the ensuing fallout can feel more devastating than any betrayal by a lover.
Ninaki, left, and Meghan met when they were two and enjoyed a close and enduring friendship that spanned around 30 years of sleepovers, shared parties, teenage road trips and shared confidences over first loves.
OK, so it wasn’t quite Beaches (the seminal movie on the ups and downs of female friendship) but it sounds like it came pretty damn close.
Rather tellingly, Ninaki says that Meghan was a “curator of a beautiful life”, a woman who threw “dinner parties with amazing menus”, loved “hotel-style bedding” and was “a perfectionist”.
But in 2011, when Meghan was flying high in the Toronto-based drama Suits, her marriage to TV producer Trevor Engelson broke down and not soon after her friendship with Ninaki went with it.
“A month after the divorce I wanted to see how Trevor was doing, so we met and talked,” says Ninaki, who works as a designer in LA.
“What came to light after Trevor and I spoke ended my friendship with Meghan. I think everybody who knew them both was in shock.”
She doesn’t give any detail but what’s clear is that she didn’t like what she heard, made a judgement against her lifelong friend and took Trevor’s side.
Our survey said: “ . . . Uh oh.”
She adds: “I think Meghan was calculated in the way she handled people and relationships. She is very strategic in the way she cultivates circles of friends. Once she decides you’re not part of her life, she can be very cold.”
Hmmmmm. Ninaki’s pre-fallout reminiscences suggest a friendship where she basked in the reflected beauty, vivaciousness and glory of her friend, seeing her achieve her lifelong ambition to become a famous actress then marrying the handsome, successful Trevor with her lifelong buddy as maid of honour.
And now, of course, Meghan has met a real-life prince who is besotted by her.
Perhaps, as Ninaki suggests, fame did change Meghan and she forgot who her friends were.
But someone’s fame can also make their old friends behave badly too and, to my mind, Ninaki’s “curator of a beautiful life” remark harbours a whiff of the deeply corrosive emotion that is jealousy.
Either way, what a waste of the precious commodity that is a long-standing female friendship.
Hole in the border bluster
BREXIT talks have stalled yet again (yawn) over the hotly debated issue of what happens to the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.
With the former leaving the EU and the latter staying, the sticking point is whether the 310-mile border will be soft (no checks), invisible (using number plate recognition technology) or hard, with customs controls that some feel might undermine the fragile peace agreement.
Really? One man who lived in Londonderry during the “hard border” era of The Troubles recalls that the only customs posts were on the main roads and opened from 8am to 6pm. The rest of the time they were wide open.
In addition, hundreds of smaller roads crossed the border without any controls at all and livestock etc were regularly smuggled across under the cloak of darkness.
So all this sudden concern now rings a little hollow.
Emily's spaghetti oooooooops
POSING for Love magazine’s Advent calendar, model Emily Ratajkowski rubs herself in spaghetti, that well known, er, festive fare.
Has she suffered an allergic reaction and gone into anaphylactic shock, poor love?
Or is that what passes as a sexy expression these days?
Do Lidl stock bodies?
SUPERMODEL Heidi Klum has designed a range of clothes for the low-budget supermarket chain Lidl.
It includes this wowzer, gold sequinned mini dress at an incredible £14.99.
Fabulous. Now if we could just buy Heidi’s figure to go in it . . .
Lost Love Island
“WITH great sadness, we’ve decided to separate. Our schedules made it difficult. We’ll remain good friends.”
A statement from Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his equally busy, philanthropist wife Melinda, perhaps?
Or the hard-working Princess Anne and husband Timothy Laurence?
Nope, it’s Kem and Amber, that couple who had sex on TV reality show Love Island and have been dating for, ooh, about five months now.
Stop sniggering at the back.
I forget like, er... thingy
DAWN FRENCH says the menopause was “a thief of my memory, so I had to write lists to remember stuff – I still do”.
Join the club, dear.
I have a luminous-coloured stick-it note that travels everywhere with me as I endlessly add to it, cross off completed tasks (oh, the satisfaction) and transfer the uncompleted ones to next week’s list.
Not long ago I lost it and spent the day in a state of catatonic inactivity which, truth be known, I rather enjoyed.
MOST READ IN OPINION
KEZIA DUGDALE says she went in to the I’m A Celebrity jungle because she wanted to show that not all politicians “look like Stanley [Johnson] and are white, old, male and stale.”
No, indeed. Some of them are white, in their late thirties, female and stale.
Trump Twitter Troubles
DONALD TRUMP was rightly ridiculed after sending a robust Twitter message meant for Theresa May to mum of three Theresa Scrivener, whose middle name is May.
But the fact that the Twitter-obsessed Leader of the Free World considers the British PM such an irrelevance that he doesn’t even know her correct handle doesn’t exactly bode well for the supposed special relationship either.
THE SAS is considering making the famously gruelling physical selection process easier for women.
Suggestions include giving them more time to finish and being able to carry lighter loads during long treks.
Women undoubtedly have many skills we can bring to the world of covert operations, but surely having the physical strength to lug an injured comrade to safety is one of the most fundamental?
A sock in the mush
A CHARITY shop in Chard, Somerset, has been handed a pair of socks with £5,000 stuffed inside.
Police issued an appeal to find the owner but no one came forward.
Local copper PC Paul Thomas says: “It’s a wonderful result.”
Not for the poor sod who hasn’t yet realised that their wife/husband has given their sock drawer a pre-Christmas clean and inadvertently cleared out their life savings along the way.