A YouTube prank left a royal commentator with her career in ruins while being branded a "liar" and "Nazi-supporting white supremacist," she said on a new episode of Newsweek's The Royal Report podcast.
In 2021, ahead of the release of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's extended sit-down with Oprah Winfrey, Victoria Arbiter, her father Dickie Arbiter (Queen Elizabeth II's former spokesman), and a number of other royal commentators took part in interviews.
The production company behind the commentators' interviews said that they were to provide background context, and would be speaking about the interview in the past tense as part of a special program being pre-recorded to go live after the Oprah broadcast.
However, the group was the victims of a prank by YouTube content creators Archie Manners and Josh Pieters, who released the interviews (speaking as if Harry and Meghan's interview had already happened) ahead of the broadcast instead, under the title: "We Proved Royal Experts Lie About Harry and Meghan."
After the video was released, Arbiter's contract with CNN in the United States was not renewed and she claims other job offers were rescinded, leaving her unable to earn a living after being labeled a "liar."
"I did nothing wrong, but they suggested I lied and this narrative of anything related to Harry and Meghan at the time just went gangbusters on social media and the avalanche of hate that came in was extreme," she told Newsweek's chief royal correspondent, Jack Royston on The Royal Report.
"I know a lot of people in the royal sphere have been subjected to extreme amounts of hate, but I'm not talking a few mean tweets," Arbiter said. "It was every name under the sun, but more upsetting was that my employers were being bombarded with these accusations of me being a 'liar' and 'Nazi-supporting white supremacist,' an apartheid supporter—the most slanderous, most inflammatory comments, and it just came and came and came and it spiraled out of control."
After a swift request from Arbiter, Manners and Pieters removed her sections from the video, but the damage had been done.
"It resulted in me...losing all of my work and losing my ability to earn a pension," she said. "Losing my health insurance, which as a resident in the United States, is a very scary position to be in. And I've since spent all of my savings fighting this with lawyers because the evidence illustrates clearly that at no point did I lie or suggest that I had seen something or do anything wrong."
Despite believing she has a strong legal case to bring against the pranksters, not only for defamation but also for the lengths they went to secure the interviews, Arbiter is giving up the fight as the expense of bringing the case is too large.
"Two and a half years later, lawyers have been amazing but the U.K. justice system is prohibitively expensive," she told Royston. "So, I've kind of come to the end of the line in terms of what I can do and I continue to deal with the consequences."
"They took a gamble on knowing that I wouldn't be able to afford to file this in court," she said of Manners and Pieters. "I had hoped to settle the matter privately and I wasn't looking for money...but for me, an apology was far more important and valuable."
Arbiter said that the YouTubers "did offer to apologize. But they apologized that 'she decided to take part in our video.'"
"That's not an apology," she said. "That's just a backhanded 'she did something wrong,' but the point is that I didn't do anything wrong."
The YouTube video without Arbiter's parts included has currently been viewed over 1.6 million times on the platform, and has over 87,000 likes and 8,000 comments.
Newsweek reached out to Manners and Pieters via email at their Goon Squad Productions company for comment.
James Crawford-Smith is Newsweek's royal reporter based in London. You can find him on Twitter at @jrcrawfordsmith and read his stories on Newsweek's The Royals Facebook page.
Do you have a question about King Charles III, William and Kate, Meghan and Harry, or their family that you would like our experienced royal correspondents to answer? Email royals@newsweek.com. We'd love to hear from you.
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About the writer
James Crawford-Smith is a Newsweek Royal Reporter, based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on the British royal family ... Read more
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