There were many moments in Meghan Markle’s Netflix show that rubbed people the wrong way. Not only were her style choices deemed detached from the humble image she was attempting to portray, but her shady reason for being so adamant about her “Sussex” name change just left people feeling like everything she does is calculated. Discrepancies in some of the stories she tells of her childhood are making it worse.

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The eight-episode series “With Love, Meghan” is all about the Duchess of Sussex’s love for cooking and entertaining. Throughout the season, Meghan shares anecdotes about her childhood, which she says was filled with TV dinners and a roughin’-it lifestyle. But the inconsistencies in the details are raising some eyebrows. Whether she truly believes what she is saying or is faking it for humility’s sake, we may never know. But from what her family has said to the media, signs point to the latter.

Much like in her Netflix series, Meghan Markle has always used food to convey a very controlled public image. It’s a tactic she has used since marrying Prince Harry in 2018. In a 2021 letter to former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer advocating for national paid leave, Meghan highlighted parts of her childhood that would indicate she was of a lower socioeconomic class. The duchess infamously penned (per Paid Leave for All): “I grew up on the $4.99 salad bar at Sizzler — it may have cost less back then (to be honest, I can’t remember) — but what I do remember was the feeling: I knew how hard my parents worked to afford this because even at five bucks, eating out was something special, and I felt lucky.”

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According to some of Meghan’s relatives, her story of financial turmoil is nonsense. Among all the drama between Meghan and her half-sister Samantha Markle, Samantha claimed in a libel lawsuit against Meghan that her half-sister was badmouthing her to the media ” … in order to push her concocted ‘rags to riches’ life story, without contradiction or negation from Mrs. Markle or other family members” (via Newsweek). According to BBC, she grew up in a flourishing Los Angeles neighborhood and attended private elementary school. And when she was a kid, her father, a former Hollywood lighting director, won $750,000 in a state lottery. Meghan’s half-brother Thomas Markle Jr. told The Independent, “That money allowed Meg to go to the best schools and get the best training.”

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During a conversation with Mindy Kaling in “With Love, Meghan,” the duchess dropped a little more information about her self-reliant childhood. “I was a latchkey kid,” Meghan Markle told Kaling (per People), noting that she ate many TV dinners growing up. The term “latchkey” is traditionally defined by a child’s afterschool lifestyle, coming home to an empty house while their parents were at work. But, according to her estranged father, that was far from the truth.

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Thomas Markle Sr. told the Daily Mail, “After school I would either pick her up myself and we’d go out to eat or I’d send a car to bring her to the set [he was working on] … She was never a latchkey kid.” He also noted that most of the time, they would eat at nice restaurants.

Her dad isn’t the only one who recalls her comfortable upbringing; Meghan’s estranged half-brother, Thomas Markle Jr., called her out for lying about being underprivileged. “That’s just another one of the malarkey stories she sold to the royal family for sympathy,” Thomas Jr. told TalkTV after watching her March 2025 Netflix series. “We weren’t poor. She didn’t have to rub those two nickels together at Sizzler’s salad bar.” He added that Meghan never cooked growing up, despite her claims of enjoying it in her youth.

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Meghan Markle not only said she consumed dinner in front of the TV, but she told Mindy Kaling that fast food was a go-to. “I used to eat a lot of Pollo Loco, Taco Bell — extra hot sauce on the Mexican pizza,” she explained (via E! News). “Jack in the Box because my mom loved their tacos.” While we’ve all found ourselves at the drive-thru, it seems like Meghan’s food reality involved lots of home-cooked meals. In March 2025, Meghan told People: “Some of my favorite childhood moments are the meals that my mom would make. She’d make a lot of soul food. I remember she’d taken a Thai cooking class, so every week we had Thai BBQ chicken and spring rolls.”

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A rediscovered clip from a 2016 episode of the TV competition show “Chopped Junior” made Meghan’s critics even more skeptical of her fast food upbringing. When reviewing a young chef’s dish while appearing on the show as a guest judge, Meghan said, “This dish reminded me of the kind of food that I grew up eating in California — like that real, sort of farm-to-table fresh, really simple ingredients” (via Inside Edition). It supports an image of a well-nurtured childhood, full of fresh produce, rather than the notion that she was being fed the semi-conspicuous ingredients from fast food restaurants.

Meghan Markle’s feminist dish soap story has made enough rounds on the internet to cause a stir. The ex-royal’s so-called life-changing account is seemingly the precedent for her philanthropic leadership today. However, the story reportedly doesn’t have enough factual evidence to be deemed true.

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According to Meghan, who was featured in a 1993 Nick News segment, she wrote to retail giant Procter & Gamble at 11 years old, pleading to change the sexist phrasing in a commercial she saw at school. The advert, which originally cited “women” as the users of the dish soap Ivory Clear, was changed to “people,” supposedly in response to Meghan’s letter.

When she told the story in a 2017 Vanity Fair interview, however, it was removed in the final draft of the article. Author Tom Bower wrote in his book “Revenge: Meghan, Harry and the War Between the Windsors” that the reason was because, ” … Vanity Fair’s fact checkers had raised questions about its accuracy and, after consulting P&G and advertising historians, had concluded they could not prove the whole story” (via Newsweek). Bower further claimed: “Unknown to [Vanity Fair journalist Sam] Kashner, Thomas Markle knew [Hillary] Clinton and P&G had not replied to Meghan. The success of her ‘campaign’ was fictitious, invented by an adoring father.” After the excerpt of Bower’s book was published by The Times, Kashner shared a statement with the outlet and said the P&G story was cut from his piece, but he did not say it was due to possible inaccuracy (via Newsweek).

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