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With her food and lifestyle series, Meghan Markle has finally created a hit series for Netflix.
And it couldn’t have come soon enough.
Meghan and Prince Harry had some initial success for the streaming giant when they debuted a limited series about their lives back in 2021.
But the intervening years saw lots of forgettable projects (Polo, anyone?) and a few ideas that never even reached the pilot stage.
One of those concepts that never got off the ground was a children’s show titled Pearl.
The show never saw the light of day, but it’s the subject of a new controversy, as a well-known British author claims that Meghan stole the idea without offering any sort of compensation.
Meghan Markle faces surprising plagiarism allegation
Mel Elliott is the author of a series of kids’ books that feature a character named Pearl Power, and she claims that Meghan or someone on her team sought to steal the concept for their show.
“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 told the Daily Mail this week.
“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,” she continued.
“The world of arts and media are very competitive, and I’m afraid it’s quite common for powerful to people to rip off the work of less well-known creatives — although I’m not saying that’s what happened here.”
Lawyers for Elliott attempted to reach out to the Duchess of Sussex in an effort to make her aware of “similarities between [her] proposed animation series and [Elliott’s] work,” which they stated were “too many and too striking to be mere coincidence.”
“It also appears that there is a risk that your proposed series may infringe intellectual property rights belonging to my client and/or may give rise to a claim in passing off (or in the US, some form of unfair competition,’” they wrote in one letter.
Elliot says the alleged theft took place after she shared her ideas on a “website that enables creators to connect with film and TV producers.”
“In that listing, my client says: ‘I would love to turn Pearl Power into an animated series someday, educating children about inspirational women from modern history (as well as a few men),’” says an attorney for the author.
