Meghan Markle’s Canceled ‘Pearl’ Show Faces Plagiarism Accusations
Well, isn’t it delightful when a big-budget project trips over its own premise? British children’s author Mel Elliott has dropped a dry-eyed bombshell alleging Meghan Markle’s scrapped Netflix series Pearl was eerily similar to her 2012 Pearl Power books. According to both the Daily Mail and PEOPLE, Elliott found the parallels “too striking to ignore,” and who could blame her—after all, Netflix doesn’t exactly greenlight every corner store pitch.
Pearl was announced in July 2021 with Meghan and David Furnish attached as executive producers, promising an animated heroine who learns “to step into her power” by exploring inspiring women from history. Elliott’s Pearl Power, written years earlier, centered on a pint‑sized activist presenting school projects on luminaries before zooming off on her own adventures—yes, Billie Jean King was test‑animated in 2018. If your spidey sense tingled at the similarity, congratulations, you’re more perceptive than Netflix’s talent scouts.
Elliott claims she alerted the Duchy of Archewell in July 2021, followed by polite reminders to Archewell and Netflix in October 2021 and February 2022—crickets all around. Test footage still lives on her social media, serving as Exhibit A in what feels like a courtroom drama nobody bothered to convene. By May 2022, Netflix cited a general shake‑out in children’s animation when they quietly canned Pearl, lumping it in with several shelved series. Convenient timing, or just lazy coincidence?
No official reply ever surfaced from Archewell or Netflix, despite Elliott’s lawyers formally lodging objections and Meghan’s public persona as a feminist champion. One might say the silence was deafening—though perhaps more accurately described as a masterclass in non‑response. Now Elliott frets that if she revives her own creation, she’ll look like the imitator. That’s some cosmic irony: an author accused of copying because her idea was allegedly copied first.
This saga checks all the celebrity scandal boxes: royalty, big streaming bucks, unreturned letters, and plucky underdog frustration. It’s proof that in Hollywood’s creative soup, even well‑intentioned projects can get lost in the ladle. What’s next? Will Netflix or Archewell finally break their silence or continue ghosting like a bad Tinder match? Stay tuned—because if anyone’s going to spin this into a docuseries, it’ll probably be the Sussexes themselves.
Sources: Celebrity Storm and People Magazine, Daily Mail
Attribution: Creative Commons Licensed
