Markle put to rest rumours that she and Paltrow were feuding with a surprise cameo appearance on Paltrow’s Instagram feed.Jack Plunkett/The Canadian Press
Meghan Markle, the actor-turned-royal-turned-jam-guru, achieved a knockout blow against her extremely vocal army of internet detractors without uttering a single word. And she got to try a slice of Gwyneth Paltrow’s pie, which sounds like the set up for some steamy fan fiction, but is literally what happened earlier this week.
On Tuesday, Markle put to rest rumours that she and the Goop founder were feuding with a surprise cameo appearance on Paltrow’s Instagram feed during an AMA. A participant asked, “Are you comprehending the Meghan Markle beef that social media says you two have?” Paltrow, standing in her kitchen, answered: “I genuinely do not understand this at all, whatsoever” then added, “Do you understand this?”
At that point, the camera panned left to reveal Markle, who was sitting there eating a slice of pie. She simply shrugged because, sometimes, a gesture really does do the work. And besides a duchess would never talk with her mouth full.
To celebrity gossip hounds, the clip was nothing short of explosive – a twist worthy of M. Night Shyamalam.
To a broader online audience, it was a moment of welcome levity. “Thanks for the distraction from GroupTextGate2025,” wrote the author and cultural commentator Jo Piazza over a screengrab.
And to the Markle haters who have barely taken a breath since the release of With Love, Meghan on Netflix earlier this month, it was the ultimate flex. Her mouth was full of pie, but the accompanying shrug was full-on Dirty Harry swagger: Go ahead – make my one-pot pasta.
The “beef” rumours kicked off last week after Paltrow said in a Vanity Fair cover story that she didn’t know Markle and Prince Harry despite living close to them in Montecito.
“Maybe I’ll try to get through their security detail and bring them a pie,” she quipped, before voicing her “strong instinct to stand up for” famous women who incur the wrath of the internet.
But then, a couple of days later she posted a video of herself cooking breakfast in her own kitchen, artfully unkept in her PJs, as the theme song to WLM played in the background. Given that critics have complained that With Love, Meghan is too polished and shot on a kitchen set (not Markle’s real home), many pop culture gossips saw it as a not-so-subtle diss.
Coincidence? Pfft. Paltrow has not made an unconsidered move since signing on to star in Shallow Hal in 2001, and so the only question here is whether she and Markle had already storyboarded the big reveal when Paltrow made the pie joke to Vanity Fair.
Smart money says of course they had (and, no doubt, the AMA question was a plant.) Regardless, the melodrama gave both women a chance to have their pastry and eat it too.
For Paltrow it’s a way to tease her mean-girl persona before ultimately coming down on the side of women.
For Markle, the pie video doesn’t just stick it to her haters – it leverages them to her advantage. Without the backlash that seems to follow her like a Secret Service detail, she’s just another celebrity hawking a lifestyle brand. With it, she’s ranking in Netflix’s top 10, earning US$10-million in media exposure and going viral from the cockpit of the lifestyle mothership (a.k.a. Paltrow’s kitchen).
I still haven’t watched With Love, Meghan, nor have I read a single thing that leads me to believe it is something I would enjoy. What I have seen is a firehose of unhinged vitriol that might be suitable if the show included, say, an unmistakable Nazi arm gesture or platformed dangerous medical misinformation, but which feels totally disproportionate when levied against a woman whose biggest crime is meh TV.
The point is not that her creative efforts shouldn’t be critiqued or even mocked (Jimmy Fallon’s roast of her pretzel bags was absolutely fair game). It’s that when people on social media are threatening to cancel Netflix and spewing racist bile, you have to wonder what is fuelling that reaction. I’m not a trained professional, but I suspect it runs deeper than her new line of edible flower sprinkles.
The specific and often visceral way we hate women on the internet is more than gross, it’s scary. (See also: The TikTok “sleuths” who have made careers out of villainizing Blake Lively, or the mob that comes for Selena Gomez any time she dares to gain or lose a few kilograms).
So here I am defending a woman whose rainbow fruit platters make me want to poke my eyes out. Not just defending but congratulating. Because you don’t have to drink the organic Kool-Aid to recognize game.
What’s hilarious is the way #piegate is being covered. Most of the headlines are some variety of, “Meghan and Gwyneth shut down feud rumours” – failing to note that the women didn’t just quash the beef: They created it. Clearly, Markle has learned a thing or two from her Montecito neighbour when it comes to the fine art of trolling the trolls.
I am thinking now of a different Paltrow interview – The New York Times Magazine 2018 cover story headlined, “How Goop’s haters made Gwyneth Paltrow’s company worth $250 million.”
It’s almost too easy to imagine Markle joking between forkfuls of pie about how the whole point of the flower sprinkles (which she released in partnership with Netflix) was to get her dissenters fired up. To which Gwyenth responds, “Oh, you think edible flowers are rage bait? You should see how much they hated my jade vagina eggs.” Ha-ha ha-ha. Cha-ching, cha-ching. Now seriously, are we going to get a pastry collab? Sour grapes, anyone?
