From ‘low-class’ and ‘talentless’ to ‘narcissist and pathological liar’: a functional-pragmatic approach to Meghan Markle’s negative evaluation on X

Example 1:

In the context of Meghan Markle’s courtship with the prince, some of the tweets from the sample indirectly present her as acting strategically or opportunistically, as if she had devised a scheme to marry Prince Harry. This is conveyed through the use of explicit lexis that reveals a conscious effort on her part to aim high. Using words such as bag a prince or landed the low-hanging fruit of the Royal Family in examples (2) and (3), respectively, illustrate this belief while explicitly associating her with a negative trait, which qualifies as an on-record impoliteness strategy (Del Saz-Rubio 2023) that aims to disparage her positive image. In (2) below, there is an explicit intent to smear MM’s positive face via judgments of propriety that intertwine with those of veracity as the poster further states that MM is a liar because she has always enjoyed white privileges and has not had to endure the difficulties that other black women have gone through. This is enough for posters to question her defense of black people and to judge her behavior as untruthful through the hashtag #MeghanMarkleisaLiar, hence invoking several interrelated topics when conveying hostility and impoliteness towards this public figure.

Example 2:

On its part, example (3) embodies an invective rife with abusive language of an explicit sexual nature via the epithets sperm-belching gutter slut employed as part of a predication strategy within the ‘discourse-historical’ approach developed by Wodak (2001a; 2001b) and Reisigl and Wodak (2001). On their part, direct insults are an on-record positive impoliteness strategy aimed at disparaging the interlocutor’s public image and revealing powerful emotional arousal on the issuer’s part. What is more, the word ‘slut’, as a misogynistic slur, is, as stated by Farvid et al. (2017:544) “currently widely used within the West, to describe girls/women whose behavior falls outside of what is considered morally acceptable or respectable sexual or social conduct”. Once again, the posters’ expectations of morality trigger the hostile comments targeted toward her. Further proof of the vitriol aimed at MM in this tweet is also manifest through the poster’s conveyance of their affectual state (via taboo language), which is one of great indifference towards her via the expression who gives a fuck and the further reference to her as trash. What these predications foreground is a sexualized image of MM while implicitly attributing to her the conniving arts that have allowed her to bag the prince, hence reinforcing a dubious sexual behavior.

Example 3:

Other more explicit tweets openly refer to her sexual life and behavior and do not hesitate to use derogatory terms that label her as a low-class hooker while using nomination strategies such as Yacht Girl, as a metaphor to associate her with a certain lifestyle and with the insinuation of providing companionship or sexual favors in exchange for financial gain or social status, as shown in example (4). Tweets like this rely on the patriarchal model that has traditionally allowed men greater sexual permissiveness than women, especially concerning sexual initiation, premarital behavior (as was the case for examples 1 and 2), or even promiscuity (Soller and Haynie 2017). Likewise, this tweet combines pointed criticisms by attributing a negative trait (glorified Yacht Girl) to the positive image she holds.

Example 4:

Another source of negative judgment and hostility towards MM, intimately related to her sexual behavior, is her professional career as an actress before she married Prince Harry, both regarding her role in the TV series Suits alongside other previous appearances in the film industry. Thus, hostility focuses on her celebrity phase as a source of vitriol. In (5) below, references to her sexuality, which pertain to the private sphere of the celebrity, are intertwined with aspects of the professional realm as the respondent evaluates her performance with the adjective “raunchy” in the docufilm The Boys and Girls Guide To Getting Down,^[5] including a snapshot of the movie in which she is depicted as having a sexual encounter with another character. Thus, MM is typecast in a predetermined role proper of the raunchy film genre, while her professional career is reduced to the roles she has played as ‘sexually active’. This dwells on the impropriety of her behavior and reduces her worth as a person to her ability to provide sexual pleasure to a man.

Example 5:

In a similar vein, but through sarcasm, an off-record form of impoliteness, the poster in example (6) invokes a negative judgment of MM as s/he jokingly states that she is a source of inspiration with her A-List Holywood career. Although this could seem like a favorable appreciation of her career, the fact that the tweet is accompanied by pictures of MM undressing a man in some scenes of a sexual nature from the TV series Suits serves to convey the opposite meaning, an interpretation also aided by the eye emoji (), which compels users to look at the images to find some sort of contrast between the visuals and the linguistic message. Example 6 dwells on implicated impoliteness and humor to convey that she is not a good actress via implicature, which constitutes a more indirect form of aggression.

Example 6:

This view is also conveyed through explicit language in example (7), where, amongst other things, the respondent accuses MM of only performing roles in bed while referring to her with a predication strategy that tackles the sexual impropriety of her role as she will always be a TV mattress actress together with a negative appraisal of her competence. Ad hominem insults constitute on record impolite strategies and associations with negative aspects.

Example 7:

In other words, posters imply that MM’s professional worth is due to the bed scenes she has filmed while indirectly describing her as a second-rate actress. Consequently, her professional worth is questioned and diminished. This becomes a moral evaluation delegitimation strategy since MM is portrayed as behaving against a basic moral perspective, which is “the moral disposition which interactants possess” (Parvaresh 2019: 79) and which users bring to the interactions in which they participate. This moral disposition encompasses socially shared assumptions and expectations deeply rooted in moral values and presumptions that typically revolve around criteria for discerning behaviors as virtuous or unethical (Purzycki et al. 2018). In this case, MM’s conduct is judged against the view that women should be chaste, and the negative evaluations of her sexuality deauthorize MM as a woman, mother, and even a royal figure.

Additionally, the poster in example (7) sanctions MM on moral grounds via predication strategies that negatively assess her for other questionable moral values, i.e., being greedy, jealous, lacking empathy, and not being a feminist. On top of it, MM is also accused of using white men and then dumping them, another recurring theme in the sample analyzed, which aids in the controversy of her raciality.

All these tweets seem to illustrate the constant scrutiny and negative appraisal of aspects that belong to her celebrity phase, that is, her previous sexual life, previous relations, and the roles performed as an actress. These replies simultaneously reveal the posters’ strategic reliance on historical connotations that have linked actresses with impropriety, mainly concerning matters of sexuality (Gale and Stokes 2008). In addition, many of the tweets analyzed tiptoe towards the potential exploitation and reinforcement of racist stereotypes about African American and mixed-race women that portray them as sexually provocative and promiscuous, or more precisely, as immoral Jezebels.^[6] The Jezebel stereotype has endured with the hyper-sexualization of black female characters in contemporary entertainment media who are disproportionately dressed in provocative clothing (Mastro and Greenberg 2000: 44) and otherwise hyper-sexualized (Tukachinsky et al. 2015). Thus, race and sexuality intertwine as sources of stereotypical portrayals of MM.

Example 8:

In (8) above, for instance, the poster questions MM’s behavior regarding one of the features picked to reveal her black ancestry, i.e., her Afro hair. Consequently, the poster juxtaposes images of MM and one of her mother, Doria, as a smiley child with black curly hair with a larger updated picture of her in which she has straightened hair of a lighter tone. This is an example of implicated impoliteness aided by different verbal strategies, such as the use of rhetorical questions – as an indirect impolite strategy (see Del Saz-Rubio 2023, 2024) – aimed to attack the public image of MM in order to expose her lack of truthfulness regarding her true feelings on race.

Although the poster acknowledges the right to try different hairstyles, MM’s African heritage is questioned by accusing her of never wearing her natural curly Afro hair. The juxtaposition of the pictures indirectly implies a conscious decision to erase her African features; thus, her behavior is implicitly and morally sanctioned as wrong, according to the poster. In a similar vein, the poster accuses MM of proactively altering her nose to erase any sign of African heritage. Finally, the hashtag #MeghanMarklesAGrifter, unequivocally used to convey a negative assessment of MM’s character by explicit association of her with a negative trait, succinctly encapsulates the tweet’s content while portraying her as deceitful via questioning the veracity of her words.

While some of the posters are focused on presenting contradictory evidence, albeit via fallacies, regarding MM’s feelings on race, other tweets criticize her for resorting to artificial means to make herself look “black”. Thus, the poster in example (9) – through a rhetorical question that exposes MM’s inexplicable behavior, harshly criticizes MM for using a fake tan to make herself look more black. At the same time, other examples are rife with references to her face being not black enough. Thus, MM is again questioned on moral grounds for pretending to be something she is not, i.e., a black woman, and therefore, for trying to align with a community in which she does not seem to fit. It should be noted that these comments are rife, as the thematic analysis has shown. They need to be contextualized against the social and political moment and consider the tension between her role as a transgressor or disruptor of the tradition of the monarchy and her role as a sign of modernity (Pramaggiore and Kerrigan 2021).

Example 9:

Not only MM’s physical appearance as a core aspect of her biraciality is the aim of the vitriol directed at her. Her political stance towards racial issues is interpreted in some tweets as contradictory because her children are of white ethnicity and have fair skin, amongst other things. This is illustrated in (10), in which her impropriety is highlighted, as she is accused of crying about racism, with a fallacious reasoning: the fact that her children are not black is enough to delegitimate her as honest and truthful.

Example 10:

Respondents do not seem to agree with the notion of her being biracial, and aggression toward her is conveyed via accusations of being not black enough, trying to be too white, or using her black heritage as a card to gain approval from the black community. In example (11), she is openly accused of being a racist with an ad hominem insult and pretending to be friends only with black celebrities such as Oprah or Tyler Perry to use the race card in her favor once she started dating Prince Harry. The contrast in the pictures in (11) is intended to make her appear deceitful and unreliable due to improper behavior and purposeful lying. This is further supported in (12), where the poster socially sanctions her on the grounds that all her friends and even boyfriends have been white.

Example 11:

The assertion that she has used white men as a status-seeking strategy evokes the gender-based stereotype that views women ascending “socially” or “professionally” thanks to marriage with a man. Meghan’s alleged association with white, wealthy men (i.e., Jeffry Epstein) through the slur “yacht girl” has also been employed to cast doubt on how she secured specific roles in television series or films. By focusing on her decision to address King Charles with concerns about unconscious bias, respondents aim to unmask her for doing just the opposite of what she preaches. Thus, two judgment subtypes are simultaneously enacted to portray her in a negative light that questions her morality and adherence to the moral expectations of the echo chamber.

Example 12:

Example 13:

In addition, MM is also accused of low moral standards in her entrepreneurial attempts after she and Prince Harry gave up their titles as royals, that is, in the post-royal phase. The California-based wellness coffee brand she invested in, the Clevr coffee brand, was said to be tied to a Chinese state accused of genocide, as in example (14). Thus, she is associated with a negative trait. If this were accurate, her public image would be damaged for being the leading investor in a brand that would not uphold the highest ethical standards and human rights protections. This would implicitly expose her as a fake figure, publicly stating one thing but then doing the opposite, given the recent award she and Prince Harry received for their activism on racial justice and mental health. Thus, she is delegitimized because of her lack of truthfulness and inability to perform professionally, as embodied in the hashtags, and with the direct insult of dumb stupid, which exposes her as incapable of managing a business.

Example 14:

Other strategies to portray her as a liar include ad hominem insults via explicit lexis, mainly adjectives employed in predication strategies that associate her with a negative trait. Thus, MM is referred to as a pathological liar, a fraud, a hypocrite who is selling falsehood against other members of the royal family, fibbing or using Spanish media to smear WandK^[7] and to spread fake news. All these descriptors are employed to evaluate her negatively for not being truthful regarding intimate issues such as her pregnancy and alleged miscarriage or simply her age. The age difference between MM and the Prince becomes another source of hostility. What is more, accusations of untruthfulness are often intertwined with references to her mental instability, as she is not only a liar but is usually referred to as a pathological liar or even a narcissist sociopath (15). Some tweets underpin certain undesirable psychological traits that portray her as manipulative and self-centered as critical traits of narcissism (Sedikides et al. 2004). As is quite common, accusations of lying are combined with other gender-based themes, such as MM’s lack of competence to perform as Duchess (15), while the implicit assumption is that she is just not good enough. It should be noted that most of these tweets are also accompanied by emotional lexis, as instances of affect, as is the case in (15), where the poster expresses disgust at the thought of them both:

Example 15:

In example (16), the respondent also taps into the core theme of women as liars, a recurring theme in the literature. Some of the tweets dwell on the widespread belief or preconception that Eve’s female descendants are more prone to lying (Giallongo 2023: 64). In fact, the Christian tradition has always emphasized the feminization of the Original Sin, which was accomplished through a sexually explicit framework that stigmatized women by portraying them as accomplices of malevolent forces, often symbolized by the serpent and the devil (Durand 1999). The respondent (16) resorts to the adjective evil twice to qualify MM’s moral behavior as improper and reproachable through predication strategies that associate her with something negative, as an impoliteness strategy aimed to attack her positive face by tapping into judgments of veracity and propriety. The effect of the accumulation of negative judgment through pointed criticism and the explicit ad hominem insults reveals high vitriol on the part of the poster.

Example 16:

In a similar vein, MM’s first and even second pregnancy triggered much rumor-mongering, and some of the tweets from the corpus show this. These tweets should be analyzed within the broader context of the excessive media excitement and sensationalization surrounding the births of royal family members. In particular, as Orgad and Baldwin state (2021:) “[…] in 2019–2020, Meghan Markle was one of the most intensely-mediated mothers in the English-speaking UK, US (and perhaps the global) media”. In addition, Prince Harry’s statement to the press after the birth of his child was seen as a public, progressive, and feminist recognition of maternal labor, not only of every woman but especially of black women, considering that their experiences have always been shadowed behind a cloak of invisibility (Orgad and Baldwin 2021). Despite this, Prince Harry’s statement also hid the immense privilege that MM had had regarding safe and successful labor and also masked the significantly higher labor risk that persists for black women in general, regardless of the advantages they may have.

Taking all this into account, MM’s pregnancy and motherhood are taken as a source of negative judgment towards the celebrity. Thus, she is judged for being untruthful and having gone through the effort of faking her pregnancy in the case of her second child by, amongst other things, wearing a prosthetic bump (fake baby bump) that constantly wiggles up and down as proof of the lie (examples 17 and 18).

Example 17:

Likewise, in example (18), the poster issues the ad hominem insult FRAUD to associate her with a negative trait through predication strategies and accuses her of being untruthful while judging her once more for having low moral standards as she used racism to obtain personal benefits, i.e., having two children within the succession line. These types of tweets reflect the deep animosity that the character generates among social media participants, which gave way to so-called conspiracy theories regarding both her pregnancies. These tweets embody hostility towards values that posters perceive as being at risk, such as her intrusion into the royal family, her role as a mother, and the fact that her children, of African descent, may become part of it. These tweets portray her as an outsider in the family and the British monarchy.

Example 18:

Example 19:

For example (20), MM is accused of being ignorant of British traditions and history. In this tweet, the respondent aims to counter MM’s assertion that the royal family is sexist via fallacious arguments. By listing various female monarchs, the conclusion is drawn that Meghan is entirely ignorant of English history and traditions. Simultaneously, another judgment, one of veracity, is enacted, labeling her as a fake feminist, as this is another core trait with which she identified and which the debate on social media, in general, has sought to dismantle. The argumentative reasoning skips one premise: there is no guarantee that having women Monarchs is a sign of femininity, but this reasoning is enough to delegitimize MM.

Example 20:

MM is also called insane or a nutcase through predication strategies that negatively judge her capacity (Martin and White 2005: 53) (21) or normality (22) and which rely on direct insults with a clear intention on the part of the issuer. The use of the adjective insane implies the existence of mental issues while tapping into the well-known stereotypes of women as “neurotic” and “mentally unstable”, or “not mentally sound”, and thus needing help. Using hashtags that encapsulate the idea of her being crazy and not all in there (#LooneyTunesMeghan or #mentalhealth) also helps reinforce the respondent’s perceived lack of capacity. Likewise, in example (22), her lack of normality is attributed to her lying and being inaccurate in some of the testimonies she provided in the Oprah interview.

Example 21:

Example 22:

Thus, adjectives within the domain of stupid and ugly tend to emphasize distinct stereotypical faces of femininity (Felmlee et al. 2020). As a result, MM is also criticized for her lack of physical beauty. MM’s lack of tenacity and normality are also sources of attacks, and they usually combine with criticisms from the other judgment sub-types. In example (23), her determination is negatively assessed by qualifying her preference for a natural birth as a RECKLESS action. This decision, which questions the normalcy of her behavior, comes across as a negative trait as she rejected the royal gynecologist’s aid or advice with further implications of putting the baby in danger and refusing help from specialists in the field. Moreover, this objectionable behavior undermines aspects of tradition, and thus, she is depicted as rebellious and nonconformist regarding royal issues, an “outsider”, in a word.

Example 23:

Likewise, adjectives such as gutless or not courageous in example (24) point to a lack of tenacity as MM refuses to attend the King Charles Coronation ceremony while implicating that she is a bad mother for not allowing Archie’s family the chance to spend his birthday with them. As stated above, several judgment sub-types are intertwined as she is also cast in a negative light due to her lack of propriety, i.e., she used her son as an excuse. At the same time, the whole incident is qualified as a lie, and her honesty is questioned on a regular basis.

Example 24: