Anna Good
In an interview with The Guardian, actor Simon Rex revealed to the paper that unspecified British tabloids had tried to pay him $70,000 to lie and say that he had slept with Meghan Markle.
The pair appeared in an episode of the sitcom ‘Cuts’ together back in 2005, and according to the article, the most time they shared outside of filming was a platonic lunch date together. But those unnamed British tabloids, trying to spin a story, offered him a substantial sum to say that he and the Duchess of Sussex had done much more. An offer he adamantly refused.
“I was broke as f-ck! I really needed the money,” Rex told The Guardian. “But I’ll be on food stamps before I do that.”
After standing his moral high ground, Rex said that the Duchess wrote him a thank you letter.
In part of the letter that the actor shared with The Guardian, Markle wrote, “It’s nice to know there are still good people.”
On Friday, March 18, Rex tweeted about the events and letter, saying, “This is true. And I framed the thank you letter she wrote me. She has very nice penmanship btw.”
Markle has always had a tense relationship with British tabloids, one that she didn’t expect to have in the first place.
In the ITV documentary titled “Harry and Meghan: An African Journey” the Duchess said she’d had warnings from friends who told her not to date Prince Harry because “the British tabloids will destroy your life.” She didn’t heed their warnings and started dating Harry in 2016.
In April of 2020, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex made the decision to step back from their royal duties and broke contact with the British tabloids that raked Markle’s name through the mud, including The Sun, Daily Express, Daily Mail, and Daily Mirror.
The couple wrote an open letter to the tabloids, telling them they didn’t want to “offer themselves up as currency for an economy of clickbait and distortion.”
In an interview with Oprah Winfrey in March 2021, Prince Harry and Markle said that a major factor in their decision to leave the UK behind was the “racial undertones” in the articles the British tabloids wrote about Markle. This wasn’t the first time Prince Harry brought this up—he even spoke out about the racism in the published articles when they first started dating in 2016.