Another day & another failed gotcha attempt aimed at Meghan because Kate hugged her brother’s wife

The Daily Express has published a piece claiming Kate proved Meghan was wrong about a royal rule by hugging her sister-in-law Alizee Thevenet at Royal Ascot. Let me tell you what Meghan actually said so we can examine whether a hug at a horse racing event in 2026 debunks it. In the Netflix documentary Harry and Meghan, Meghan described her first meeting with Kate. She said she went in for a hug because she is a hugger and has always been a hugger. She said she did not realise that was jarring for a lot of Brits. She said she began to understand that the formality on the outside carried through on the inside. She was not saying Kate is incapable of hugging people. She was describing a specific cultural adjustment she had to make when entering a specific institution with specific formal conventions. Harry corroborated this in Spare. He wrote that William completely freaked out when Meghan went in for a hug at their first meeting. That William did not hug many strangers. That William had hoped she would greet him with standard reverence per protocol, but she did not know it and Harry had not told her. The Express is now using footage of Kate hugging Alizee Thevenet, her own sister-in-law, a woman she has known for years, in a relaxed social setting at Ascot, to argue that Meghan was lying about the formality of her first meeting with senior royals in 2016. These are not comparable situations. Alizee Thevenet is Kate's brother's wife. They have spent years together at family events. They share a close personal bond that predates any royal protocol consideration. A woman hugging her own sister-in-law at a day at the races is not evidence about the formality conventions of the royal household in 2016. What Meghan described was a first meeting experience in a specific institutional context. What Kate demonstrated at Ascot was warmth toward a longstanding family member in a completely different context. The two things exist entirely independently of each other and one does not comment on the other in any meaningful way. The comments under the article do exactly what the framing is designed to produce. Someone was lying. Maybe that someone with a history of being a problem was the problem. Imagine Harry married someone decent who respected the royal family. Hmmmm maybe the issue is Meghan. That is the machine working as designed. Present a completely unrelated piece of footage. Frame it as a debunking. Let the comments do the rest. Meghan said entering the royal family felt formal in ways she had not anticipated. Seven years later Kate hugged her sister-in-law at Ascot. The Express called this proof that Meghan lied. It is not proof of anything except that the Express will use any available footage, any occasion, any family moment involving Kate, to produce a story with Meghan's name in the headline and the word wrong or lied or debunked somewhere in the text. The hug was lovely. Alizee looked delighted. Kate looked warm and relaxed. None of it has anything to do with what Meghan described. And the Express knows that.