To hear them tell it, she was the boss from hell. Multiple staffers who have worked for Meghan Markle in the years since she began dating Prince Harry have described her as a “demon,” a “narcissist” and a “dictator in high heels.” They’ve accused her of “belittling” her employees and subjecting them to “relentless bullying,” “undermining,” and “emotional cruelty and manipulation” that involved “screaming,” “fuming,” “barking orders,” “reducing grown men to tears” and generally “treating people like s—t” Perhaps most telling, 18 people have quit since she and Harry moved to California in 2020. One former staffer even put his complaints in writing: “The Duchess seems intent on always having someone in her sights,” former press secretary Jason Knauf wrote in a 2018 email. “We have had report after report from people who have witnessed unacceptable behavior.”
Now another staffer is going on the record. In an exclusive interview with In Touch, Meghan’s former bodyguard Steve Davies is telling all about what it was like for him to work for the duchess. “She gets a bad rap for being a not very good person to work with, that she was this evil person in the royal family,” Steve, who had an intimate, firsthand perspective on Meghan as she transitioned from relative obscurity as a B-list actress to the unforgiving worldwide spotlight, exclusively tells In Touch. “I saw her, from working at the studio to working with charities to working with dog walkers and cleaners. There’s one huge lesson I learned from her: It’s give respect to get respect.”
Instant Fame
When they first met in 2018, Meghan’s life had essentially changed overnight. “I felt sorry [for her] because she’d gone from being a celebrity to being a member of the biggest family in the world,” says the bodyguard, who was hired by NBC to watch over the Suits star, 43, in Toronto. “It was stressful for her — all the publicity.”
The U.K. press “descended upon” the city, Meghan said in her Netflix documentary, Harry & Meghan. Her modest rental home was “surrounded”by photographers, “waiting for me to do anything,” she added. “Suddenly, it was like everything about my life got so much more insular. All the curtains were pulled, all the blinds were pulled. It was scary.”
NO WAY OUT
The constant surveillance took a toll, Steve says. “She was paranoid. We had people following us around everywhere we went. We had problems with drones, vehicles chasing us. It was a nightmare.” Everything she’d taken for granted about her old life disappeared. “After a couple of weeks of working with her, I said, ‘What do you really want to do?’ She said, ‘I’d love to be able to go and shop in a grocery store.’ The previous security team wouldn’t let her do that. So I pushed the cart around the grocery store, and she was putting stuff in it. She really enjoyed that.”
Her constraints only tightened when she moved to England. When Steve visited, he likened her life to being in a “goldfish bowl,” he tells In Touch. And in her bombshell 2021 interview on CBS, Meghan made shocking allegations about basically being trapped there. “I couldn’t call an Uber to the palace. You couldn’t just go,” she said, claiming she had to turn over her passport and keys to royal aides. Even when she asked to have lunch with her friends, she contended, “People within the Firm would say, No, you’re oversaturated, it would be best for you to not go out.’ I go, ‘Well, I haven’t left the house in months.’”
But going out wasn’t appealing, either. From the moment she began dating Harry, 40, photographers have “followed [her] around, jumping traffic lights, trying to get alongside the vehicle,” says Steve, a former British special forces soldier who is now managing partner of Focus One Group in Toronto. These “dangerous” situations — similar to those that Harry and Meghan reported during a May 2023 trip to New York City — were common, he says. If Meghan had stayed in London, he feared that “what happened to Princess Diana in Paris might have happened to her.”
The situation deteriorated so much, Meghan has admitted she suffered from suicidal ideations. “She loves Harry, she loves the children, but it can cause a lot of depression [when] you’re scared to open a paper to see what people are saying about you,” notes Steve, adding that it didn’t help that “Buckingham Palace was controlling the PR and Meghan was always used to being able to control the PR herself with her team.”
BOSS LADY
It was around this time that employees started complaining. “The staff at Buckingham Palace [said they] couldn’t stand working for her,” Steve says. But back in Toronto, aides had seen a different side of Meghan. “Nobody had a bad word to say about her. Even with the pressure that she was under, she was warm and considerate all the time,” he insists, adding that what might surprise people most is “how friendly she is and what a big heart she has. She’s great to her fans, and she would go out of her way to help people. That’s what hurts me — that people believe [otherwise].”
And that’s why he’s speaking out now. Though he no longer works for her, Steve considers Meghan a friend. “My wife and I got invited to the wedding, that’s how close we became,” he says, adding that they exchange emails on birthdays and holidays. “I would work with her again, not a problem at all. She was a good person to work for, and she still is a good person.”
