Meghan Markle did not wait a full day.
Gloria Steinem died on September 2 at 92. By the next morning, the Duchess of Sussex had posted a long Instagram eulogy calling the late activist her “friend and mentor,” claiming Steinem spent Thanksgiving with the Sussexes, “loved our children with her whole heart,” counseled her “during hard times,” and even gave her a bracelet stamped with the slogan “we are linked, not ranked.” She posted a silver-framed snapshot of Steinem with a toddler whose face had been covered — widely understood to be Prince Archie — and wrote as if she were the family’s appointed keeper of Steinem’s private memory.
The tribute was immediately treated as another chapter in Meghan’s lifelong origin story: the 11-year-old who wrote to Procter & Gamble after an Ivory dishwashing ad said “Women all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans,” appeared on Nickelodeon’s Nick News, and later told UN audiences that this was the moment she “unknowingly and somehow accidentally became a female advocate.” She has repeated that tale for years as if it were a founding document.
Then the old photograph resurfaced.
Meghan, center of the frame at a crowded Northwestern-era party, grinning in a white tank top with the Playboy bunny printed large across her chest.
That is the picture she does not put in a silver frame.
The contrast is not subtle. Steinem’s most famous early stunt was going undercover as a Playboy Bunny in 1963 for “A Bunny’s Tale,” an exposé she later called a “professional error of gigantic proportions” because it trapped her inside the very image she had set out to puncture. Meghan’s college snapshot is not an exposé. It is a party photo. A young woman wearing the logo of the industry Steinem infiltrated in order to condemn it — then, decades later, draping herself in Steinem’s name the moment the woman was no longer alive to object.
Critics circling the tribute asked the question Meghan never answers: if Gloria Steinem was this intimate family presence — Thanksgiving guest, children’s champion, late-night tea counselor — why does the public only get the relationship in the hours after a death, packaged with a framed child photo and a slogan bracelet? One observer put it bluntly: did she haul that frame across the Atlantic in the scramble back to Britain, or was a Montecito snapshot suddenly “useful”?
The timing of the move makes the performance worse, not better. In mid-August, after six years of “Megxit,” Prince Harry and Meghan announced they would spend an “extended period” in the United Kingdom so Archie and Lilibet could start school. They kept the Montecito mansion and the Portugal place. They are not returning as working royals. King Charles was told on a Sunday. The British public, polled into the ground on this couple, has not forgotten Spare, the Oprah interview, the security lawsuits, or the years spent lecturing the country they have now decided is convenient again.
Harry’s role in this latest performance is the same role he has played since 2018: human shield and amplifier. He let his wife turn a private family into a content machine, then followed her back across the ocean after the California project — Netflix, Spotify, the jam brand, the victim tour — stopped paying the way they expected. When Meghan needs a feminist halo, Harry is the husband who once barged into a backyard interview to tell Gloria Steinem he was a feminist too. When Meghan needs distance from the Firm, Harry writes a book that airs every grievance. When the money and the invitations thin out, they come home and call it family. That is not principle. That is logistics.
None of this requires inventing college horror stories. The rumor that Meghan once glued a sorority sister’s eyelids shut has been circulating for years and remains unproven; Snopes found no court records, no contemporaneous reporting, no testimony. Treating that claim as fact would do her the favor of making the real record look smaller than it is. The real record is already enough: a woman who has spent a decade selling moral seriousness while treating other people’s lives — her father’s, her in-laws’, now a dead feminist’s — as props.
Look at the two pictures side by side and the branding strategy is obvious.
On one side, the eulogy kit: stone wall, silver frame, activist in a garden chair, child’s face hidden, caption about linkage not ranking. On the other, the Northwestern party: Meghan in the Playboy tank, surrounded by other young women, no slogan, no mentor, no “we are linked.” One image is the product. The other is the inventory she hoped would stay in someone else’s camera roll.
Steinem’s actual record does not need Meghan Markle as executor. She co-founded Ms., spent half a century arguing that women should not be ranked by husbands, titles, or proximity to power, and was blunt enough in 2020 to say Meghan’s “princess” status was “a problem” because “we had a revolution to get rid of royalty.” That quote is still on the record. It did not make the Instagram caption.
What did make the caption is the familiar Sussex method: seize a death, a war, a wildfire, a holiday, a child’s birthday, and convert it into proof that they were always the moral center of the story. Harry has spent six years insisting the British press invented a monster. Meghan has spent the same six years insisting she was a child crusader who grew into Steinem’s heir. The Playboy tank does not make her a villain. It makes her a student at a party. The condemnation is not the shirt. It is the adult who built a public identity on purity, ranked herself against the institution that gave her a title, then used a dead woman’s reputation as the next product drop.
If Meghan wants to talk about what Gloria Steinem meant to her, she can start with the part Steinem actually wrote down: do not confuse a costume with a cause, and do not confuse a title with a life’s work. The bunny on the tank was a joke at a party. The tribute was the costume. Harry stood behind both, as he always does — not as a partner who reins her in, but as the prince who discovered that condemning his own family was the one job he could still get paid to perform.
The photo did not leak from a palace archive. It has been online. The only thing that changed this week is that Meghan handed her critics the caption. She asked the world to hear more about Gloria Steinem and the little girl with the dish-soap letter. They heard her. Then they looked at the tank.
