Jeremy Clarkson, the host of the docuseries Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime, has released a statement after a column he wrote in Brit tabloid The Sun about Meghan Markle led to more than 6,000 complaints to the country’s press regulator.
In Friday’s piece — which attracted condemnation from across the media landscape (including from his own daughter) over the weekend — Clarkson wrote that Prince Harry was being “controlled” by Markle, and he was “dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her.”
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In a bizarre rant, Clarkson — who in 2015 was fired as host of the BBC’s motoring show after punching a producer — added that he hated Markle more than convicted serial killer Rose West and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. “I hate her on a cellular level,” he wrote, claiming, “Everyone who’s my age thinks the same way. But what makes me despair is that younger people, especially girls, think she’s pretty cool. They think she was a prisoner of Buckingham Palace, forced to talk about nothing but embroidery and kittens.”
The column, which came in response to the Harry & Meghan docseries on Netflix, sparked an immediate backlash. In an Instagram post, Clarkson’s daughter, podcast host Emily Clarkson, said she wanted to “make it very clear that I stand against everything my dad wrote about Meghan Markle.” She added: “My views are and have always been clear when it comes to misogyny, bullying and the treatment of women by the media.”
Sturgeon, meanwhile, told BBC Scotland that the “overwhelming emotion I have for men like Jeremy Clarkson is pity,” adding that she couldn’t “imagine what it must be like to be so consumed and distorted by hate of other people, and in his case it appears women in particular, that you end up writing that toxic, vile abuse.”
On Monday, Clarkson addressed the response (although not with an actual apology). On Twitter, he wrote he was “horrified” to have “caused so much hurt,” appearing to suggest the sole issue was a “clumsy reference to a scene in Game of Thrones” that had “gone down badly with a great many people.”
The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to a rep for the show for comment.
