Meghan Markle’s Canceled Netflix Show Faced Plagiarism Claims

• Meghan Markle’s scrapped Netflix animated series is now facing plagiarism allegations
• British author Mel Elliott recently told the Daily Mail how Meghan’s Pearl series bore “striking” similarities to her Pearl Power children’s books
• Elliott said she and her lawyers reached out to a representative for the Duchess of Sussex and Netflix multiple times but never heard back: “I would have loved to have contributed and collaborated”

A British author is claiming that Meghan Markle‘s proposed children’s series for Netflix bore striking similarities to her children’s books.

Mel Elliott told the Daily Mail that Pearl — a TV series announced by the Duchess of Sussex in July 2021, for which she and Elton John’s husband, David Furnish, were to serve as executive producers before it was dropped — had similarities “too great for me to ignore” to her children’s book series, Pearl Power.

PEOPLE has reached out to representatives for the Duchess of Sussex and Netflix for comment.

Pearl centered on a little girl who “learns to step into her power and finds inspiration from influential women throughout history.” While Elliott’s three Pearl Power books didn’t initially feature famous women from history, they did center on female empowerment and equity.

In 2018, years before Meghan’s Netflix announcement, Elliott says she started working on plans to turn Pearl Power into an animated series. She said her idea was to open each episode with Pearl presenting a school project on a famous, inspiring woman, before going on a shared adventure. Test animation for the first episode, which was set to feature tennis legend Billie Jean King, is still available to view on Elliott’s social media pages.

Elliott told the Daily Mail, “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. 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.”

“The world of arts and media are very competitive, and I’m afraid it’s quite common for powerful people to rip off the work of less well-known creatives — although I’m not saying that’s what happened here,” she noted. 

Elliott said that her lawyers sent Meghan a letter via the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s charitable organization, the Archewell Foundation, in July 2021, and the author herself followed up with personal missives to both Archewell and Netflix in October 2021 and February 2022. However, she never heard anything back. 

In May 2022, Netflix announced that Meghan’s Pearl series had been canceled. At the time, the streamer said they were scaling back on animated projects, citing Pearl as one of several children’s shows that were cancelled around the same time.

Elliott said, “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.”

She added,“Pearl was my dream project and now, annoyingly, if I reprise my own creation, it’s going to look like I have copied the idea from someone else.”

“What saddened me most is that, having brought the similarities between my Pearl and Meghan’s Pearl to the attention of Netflix and Archewell, my objection was never acknowledged,” she added. “Neither Netflix nor Archewell responded to me when I would have loved to have contributed and collaborated.”

The author claimed that she didn’t take her plagiarism claims public at the time to avoid public scrutiny. She was also in the midst of a health battle, having been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019.

Prince Harry and Meghan signed a deal with Netflix in 2020 for a reported $100 million. In addition to With Love, Meghan, which premiered in March and will have a second season air later this year, they starred in the docuseries Harry & Meghan in 2022. They also produced Polo, Live to Lead and Heart of Invictus.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s Archewell Productions also plan to adapt romance novel Meet Me at the Lake by author Carley Fortune to the streaming service.