Expert concludes Meghan Markle deployed secret special ops training to defeat Oprah

Meghan Markle has a very particular set of skills that she’s acquired over a long media career. They’re skills that make her a nightmare for interviewers and, if you press her too hard, if you grill her, if you needle her on awkward points she will gaze mournfully into your eyes, she will quiver her lower lip and she will cry at you.

Or at least, that’s what ‘royal expert’ (boy there are so many of them about!) Robert Lacey believes. In his book Battle of the Brothers he claims Markle deployed her super secret special ops training to manipulate, befuddle, and ultimately defeat the undisputed queen of daytime TV Oprah Winfrey.

According to Lacey, Markle is thought to have undergone what’s essentially the British royal family’s equivalent of Black Widow Red Room training. Sadly, as far as we know, this isn’t a program designed to turn would-be princesses into cold, unfeeling killing machines (palace life seems to do that anyway), but instead uses elite operatives to instruct royals on how to mentally dominate kidnappers.

Lacey argues that Markle was placed under the tutelage of Britain’s famed Special Air Service (SAS), which would have put her through her paces in a series of mock high-risk security scenarios. This would have entailed realistic roleplays of how situations like a royal event becoming the target of a terrorist attack or in a situation where she’d have to deal with would-be assassins.

But Markle apparently excelled in the mock kidnapping exercise. According to Lacey, and backed up by the 2020 book Finding Freedom, Markle underwent an “extremely intense and scary” fake kidnapping, likely involving her being restrained and threatened by screaming, armed and tense men.

During this process, Markle gained the ability to “deploy her self-pity to such dramatic effect”, which she later ruthlessly deployed on Oprah Winfrey during the Sussex’s bombshell interview. As Lacey puts it: “Meghan would certainly offer a brilliant impression of a hostage begging for liberation on primetime television – and the world would come rushing to rescue her.”

If true, this would mean Markle not only fooled one of the most experienced broadcasters in the world, but also successfully pulled the wool over the eyes of millions of viewers. How utterly diabolical, we can only doff our hats with respect to such a master manipulator…

Of course, the subtext to all this is to claim Markle was lying throughout her interview and that the British royal family isn’t actually a gang of out-of-touch emotionally deadened dinosaurs with a worrying racist streak. Evidence would suggest that in fact they are that, so the jury’s out on whether Markle’s tears were real or not.

Even so, we’re eager to learn what other secret skills Markle picked up during her SAS training. With Love, Meghan season 2 would be a heck of a lot more compelling if we got to see her explaining how to plant C4, disassemble a submachinegun, or riddle a group of flashbanged terrorists with bullets.