Did Meghan Markle plagiarize her now-cancelled show? Children's author raises allegations

British author Mel Elliott sent a legal letter to Meghan Markle, pointing out "striking similarities" between her work and Meghan's cancelled children's TV show, Pearl.

Markle had announced Pearl, a children's animated series about a little girl "as she learns to step into her power and finds inspiration from influential women throughout history' in July 2021. However, Elliott, while speaking to Daily Mail in an article published on April 20, claims that Meghan Markle's show was plagiarized from her book, Pearl Power.

"Meghan is a feminist who sticks up for other women, so I was disappointed and confused to see how similar Netflix's proposed show 'Pearl' was to my own 'Pearl Power', who had been created seven years earlier."

Elliott also added,

"Of course, I can't know if anyone on her team had seen it and been inspired by it, but the similarities were too great for me to ignore."

Pearl was a part of Markle and Prince Harry's $100 million deal with Netflix and was announced in development at the streaming platform, with Markle as an executive producer alongside Sir Elton John's husband David Furnish. However, the show was cancelled less than a year later, and Meghan Markle removed all references of it from her production company, Archewell's website.

Mel Elliott published her Pearl Power books in 2014, 2015, and 2018 and was in discussions to adapt the franchise into a TV series with tennis star Billie Jean in 2019. The third book in the series was a huge success, and was translated into Japanese, Mandarin, Korean, French, Spanish, and Dutch, and was being published in the UK and USA.

Elliott also claimed that her legal team had sent a formal letter to Markle in 2021 alleging possible infringement of her copyright, along with two more letters to Archewell Productions and Netflix, but never received a response.

"I am glad that Meghan's Pearl show was dropped" - says Mel Elliott about Meghan Markle

While speaking to Daily Mail in an article published on April 20, children's author Mel Elliott allegedly called Meghan Markle, "powerful" insinuating, that she ripped off the work of a lesser known creative such as herself.

"I am glad that Meghan's Pearl show was dropped, and I hope that I had something to do with it. But what I really wanted was for it to have gone ahead, and for me to have been acknowledged or invited to work as a collaborator on the series."

The author also called Pearl her "dream project" and mentioned that if now she reprises her own creation, it's "going to look like I have copied the idea from someone else."

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The author also mentioned that she didn't make her plagiarism claims public at the time, to avoid public scrutiny and also since she was in the midst of a health battle.

Meghan Markle and Netflix are yet to respond to the allegations.

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