TRUE, THAT

Stephen A. Smith: Meghan and Harry Are Only Interesting When ‘Insulting Their Family’

The ESPN sportscaster has become the latest figure to pile on the Sussexes after their Spotify deal ended.

The Harry and Meghan haters are having quite a week.

After the couple were dropped by Spotify following Meghan Markle’s widely mocked podcast, Archetypes, one of the company’s top executives, sportscaster Bill Simmons, described them as “fucking grifters” and Kelly Osbourne described Harry as a prince who dressed as a Nazi and is now “trying to come back as the pope.”

Let’s hope the couple are staying off social media Wednesday, then, after another sports personality, ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, has said the couple are only interesting when “insulting their family.”

“If Prince Harry and the Duchess of Sussex ain’t complaining about the royal family, I don’t know if anybody cares what they have to say,” Smith said on his podcast, The Stephen A. Smith Show. “... I’m not trying to dog [Meghan] like she doesn’t have any talent or anything like that. She did damn good on Suits… I love Suits. Matter of fact, I’m gonna watch it again.

“But what I’m saying is, you don’t really care what they have to say unless they’re insulting their family.”

Smith also addressed the critical comments made of the couple by his former ESPN colleague Bill Simmons.

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He said: “I like Bill. I respect the hell out of Bill Simmons, ain’t no shade here. But Bill Simmons was going off… Bill Simmons seemed very happy they were gone.”

Smith added, “I never knew what the hell ‘grifters’ meant. So I had to look it up.”

(A grifter, what Simmons called Harry and Meghan, is a con artist, someone who swindles people out of their money through fraud.)

“In all seriousness, he’s qualified to say that. I am not, because I know nothing of them. I know nothing about their [Spotify] deal… I didn’t think that was necessary, but then again, he works at Spotify, not me. So he knows more than I would ever know about that particular situation, which means it came from a personal place.”

The couple faced similar criticism from the writer Marina Hyde, a columnist at the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper, who wrote: “The Sussexes have to be realistic here: no one really cares about the children’s book about the bench… people want to watch them complain about their lives and their treatment by the royal family. That is the sole genre in which Meghan and Harry truly pull in the eyeballs.”

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Tom SykesEuropean Editor at Large

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