Jeremy Clarkson, the former host of Top Gear who had made abusive remarks towards Meghan Markle, apologized to her on Monday.
British presenter Jeremy Clarkson announced on Monday that he had apologized to Meghan Markle and her husband Prince Harry for a column in which he violently attacked the Duchess of Sussex.
After the broadcast on Netflix last month of the docuseries devoted to the sensational departure of the couple from the British monarchy, preceding the great unpacking of Prince Harry’s memoirs, Jeremy Clarkson had published a column in the tabloid The Sun detailing his dislike of the Duchess of Sussex.
He wrote of dreaming of being “paraded naked through the streets of every town in the UK, while the crowds shouted ‘Shame!’ and would throw excrement at him”.
Record number of complaints
The article sparked a cascade of public condemnations and a record number of complaints (more than 20,000) to the British press regulator.
“Horrified” to have “caused so much pain”, the 62-year-old presenter invoked a “clumsy reference to (the series) Game Of Thrones“.
The “regrets” expressed by the tabloid had been described as a “comment stunt” by a spokesperson for Harry and Meghan, deploring that the newspaper had not contacted the Duchess of Sussex to apologize to her.
“On Christmas morning I emailed Harry and Meghan in California apologizing,” Jeremy Clarkson wrote in a lengthy Instagram post on Monday.
“I said I was baffled by what they said on TV but the language I used in my column was shameful and I was deeply sorry,” he added.
The former presenter of the hit car show Top Gear explained that he “forgot” to mention the reference to game of thrones. “It felt like I was indeed calling for appalling violence to befall Meghan’s head.”
“Walk of Shame”
In one of the show’s most defining sequences, a woman undergoes a “walk of shame”, where she is forced to wander the streets naked while people throw trash at her.
At the heart of many controversies in the past, sometimes accused of racist outings, Jeremy Clarkson had been fired from the BBC, which produces the show Top Gear, after physically and verbally attacking a producer.
He has since reformed the trio that made the success of Top Gear with bandmates James May and Richard Hammond on Amazon Prime, where he also has a show that follows his adventures as a farmer.
