The pictures are back. Strapless black dress, gold clutch, camera-ready smile, a male model’s arm locked around her waist on a London red carpet. For years those shots were waved off as nothing more than two co-hosts posing at Eva Longoria’s Global Gift Gala. Now a far uglier version of that night is circulating — and it does not flatter the woman who later sold herself as a wronged humanitarian, or the prince who wrecked his family to follow her.
On 19 November 2013, then-Suits actress Meghan Markle co-hosted the London Global Gift Gala at the ME Hotel with British model Oliver Cheshire. The pair walked the carpet together, posed hip-to-hip, and later stood at the podium auctioning holiday packages. Cheshire was not available. He was already with singer Pixie Lott — the woman he later married. That much is on the record.
What has reignited the story is not the Cheshire photos. It is the claim that Meghan’s real target that night was another man in the room: former Scotland rugby international turned model Thom Evans.
According to the version now ripping through social media, Meghan did not go home with Cheshire. She hooked up with Evans after the gala — a liaison that, the claim goes, finished off Evans’s already strained romance with 90210 actress Jessica Lowndes. The official gossip-column timeline had Evans and Lowndes splitting in late October 2013 over the Atlantic distance. The revived account says that was a tidy cover story, and that the relationship actually collapsed a few weeks later, after the November event.
Mainstream papers never printed a Meghan–Evans affair. They did print that Evans was at the same gala. Press Association photographers captured him on the carpet that night. Getty footage from the arrivals shows him being interviewed inside the venue. He and Markle were in the same room, at the same charity circus, at the same moment she was openly shopping for a British life.
That last part is not rumor. It is what people who sat next to her that week have said for years.
She wasn’t there for the auction paddles
By November 2013 Meghan’s marriage to Hollywood producer Trevor Engelson was already over in all but the paperwork. The divorce would be finalized the following year. She had flown into London on what friends and later reporting described as a networking “hustle”: get known in Britain, get on television if possible, get an English boyfriend.
TV presenter Lizzie Cundy has repeated the same story across multiple interviews. Seated beside the then-unknown American at a pre-gala dinner hosted by phone tycoon John Caudwell, Cundy says Meghan was blunt.
She wanted an English boyfriend. She loved English men. She was single. She asked if Cundy knew any famous guys. She talked about Made in Chelsea. She said Hollywood was brutal and that she would feel at home in London. On the red carpet itself she told Cundy the weather was cold but “the people are so warm,” and that being called “love” and “darling” made her want to “stick around for a while.”
Cundy later said she even floated footballer Ashley Cole as a possible set-up. Meghan passed. The hunt continued. Three years later she landed a prince. Cundy says that once the ring went on, she was ghosted.
That is the pattern critics keep coming back to. Not a shy actress who stumbled into history. A woman who arrived in London with a checklist, worked the room, posed like she was already famous, and treated men — and later an entire royal household — as rungs on a ladder.
The Cheshire pictures were the decoy
The photos now being shared again are the Cheshire ones because they are the ones cameras caught. Arms around waists. Her body angled toward the lenses. His tuxedo, her ruched black dress, the gold clutch clenched like a prop. Online commenters have not been kind: they call the posing narcissistic, transactional, “up for sale.” Whether that language is fair is beside the point. The pictures show a woman who knew exactly where the cameras were.
Cheshire was Pixie Lott’s man. He was doing a hosting job. Treating those images as proof of a romance with him is sloppy. Treating them as proof of nothing is sloppier. They are evidence of how aggressively Meghan worked a British celebrity room months after her marriage collapsed — the same week Thom Evans, freshly out of a publicized relationship, was standing a few feet away in the same hotel.
Evans and Lowndes had been the tabloid couple of 2013: Coachella kisses, Wimbledon, family introductions, Evans telling magazines she “ticks all of my boxes.” By September, Lowndes was still insisting they were together. By 23 October, British papers announced a mutual split blamed on distance, with a source adding they had been “on and off for quite a while.” Then, four weeks later, both Evans and Markle are at the same London gala. Then the claim: the relationship’s real ending came after that night.
Is the hookup proven? No. Has anyone from that circle gone on the record with dates, texts, or a confession? No. What is proven is the opportunity, the motive she herself advertised to Cundy, the messy official timeline, and a decade of Meghan rewriting her own origin story as if she had never hunted status in a borrowed city.
Then she found a better Englishman — and he let her burn the house down
Prince Harry did not invent this woman. He married the finished product and then spent years insisting the world had invented her critics.
The same social climber who co-hosted a mid-tier charity gala and asked a WAG which famous British men were free later walked into the House of Windsor, extracted a title, extracted a global platform, and helped drive Harry into a public war with his own father, brother, and the institution that raised him. They sat with Oprah and leveled racism allegations they have never substantiated with a name. Harry published Spare and turned private family grief into a product. They took the half-in, half-out deal the late Queen said was impossible, then cashed the titles anyway. Spotify’s Bill Simmons later called them “effing grifters.” Publishing partners cooled. Hollywood friends drifted. The California experiment that was supposed to prove they were bigger than the Palace has looked, from the outside, like a long, expensive sulk.
Harry’s defenders still talk about love. Fine. Love does not require you to torch your grandmother’s final years, your brother’s family, and the country that paid for your childhood so your wife can keep starring in her own origin myth. The 2013 pictures are useful because they puncture the myth. They show the night before the brand: a divorced actress on a networking trip, glued to a taken model for the cameras, circulating in a room that also contained a newly single rugby pin-up, telling anyone who would listen that she wanted a British boyfriend and a British life.
She got both. Britain got the bill. Harry got the isolation he now markets as courage.
The Oliver Cheshire photographs were never the scandal. They were the brochure. The brochure said: I am here, I photograph well, I want in. A decade later the Sussexes are still selling the same brochure, only now the product is victimhood and the price is other people’s reputations. If even half of the Evans claim is true, it is not a glamorous footnote. It is the same story in a smaller room — a relationship treated as collateral, a timeline tidied up after the fact, and a woman who has never stopped auditioning for a better part.
Harry chose that. He can keep choosing it. The rest of us are allowed to look at the 2013 carpet, look at what followed, and refuse to clap.
