Meghan Markle and JFK Jr.'s Wife Share the Same Cruel Fate, Says Author
Meghan Markle and the late Caroline Bessette-Kennedy's journeys after their high-profile weddings might hold resemblances.
While the UK has proudly had a royal family at its political zenith for ages, the US never did. But the Kennedys had unofficially taken on that position. And in both countries, when women from contrasting backgrounds married into royalty, they faced extreme media scrutiny. A cruel fate experienced by Meghan Markle and the late Caroline Bessette-Kennedy.
Neither of the two women came from the aristocracy. Markle had been a successful actress on Suits, and Bessette-Kennedy was a public relations director at Calvin Klein before their respective weddings to Prince Harry and John F. Kennedy Jr. Both their love stories seemed straight out of fairytale books, until both stories took an ugly turn. Thanks to a kind of public vitriol that was never seen before. “Certainly, there are people today who would balk at a comparison between Meghan Markle and Carolyn Bessette,” royal author Caroline Halleman said via Town and Country Magazine.
Little did Markle know when she called Bessette-Kennedy’s wedding dress 'everything goals', that their lives would draw parallels years later. One of the top criticisms leveled against both of them is that they knew what they were signing up for when they married into such magnanimous families. However, Halleman argued against that logic, saying, “I love how people say Meghan knew what she was getting into…people said the same thing about Carolyn Bessette when she married into the Kennedy family. You could never know. Meghan said it right the perception is nothing like the reality.”
Halleman pointed out that the intense public scrutiny leveled at Markle and Bessette-Kennedy was largely due to the “protectiveness” and “ownership” people felt over Harry and Kennedy Jr.’s lives. “An emotional attachment exists, and for some, a parasocial relationship. The sad twelve-year-old forced to walk behind his mother’s coffin had grown up and found happiness, and the public was invested in that love story, but they also felt they were owed a certain amount of access to what they imagined to be his fairy-tale life,” she further added.
Things came to such a head for Markle and Harry that the couple stepped away from the monarchy in 2020 and moved to the US, at the cost of estrangement from the royal family. Comparing the journeys of the Duchess of Sussex and Bessette-Kennedy, Sasha Chermayeff, Kennedy Jr’s close friend, reportedly told Halleman, “The comparison was obvious, because I saw how hard it was for Carolyn. It was just so hard for her. Immediately, I picked up on the fact that the way that Meghan was being judged, and had to be, and was under that immediate pressure, that the most important thing was to satisfy this image for this family, which is representing something larger.”
The Sussex and Kennedy love stories have received widespread media attention, becoming the subjects of several films and series. Most recently, the popular show ‘American Love Story’ depicted the American couple’s romance. Bessette-Kennedy and Kennedy Jr. unfortunately passed away in a tragic plane crash in 1999.
