Studying Time: 3 minutes
Together with her meals and life-style collection, Meghan Markle has lastly created a success collection for Netflix.
And it couldn’t have come quickly sufficient.
Meghan and Prince Harry had some preliminary success for the streaming big once they debuted a restricted collection about their lives again in 2021.
However the intervening years noticed plenty of forgettable initiatives (Polo, anybody?) and some concepts that by no means even reached the pilot stage.
A type of ideas that by no means received off the bottom was a youngsters’s present titled Pearl.
The present by no means noticed the sunshine of day, however it’s the topic of a brand new controversy, as a widely known British writer claims that Meghan stole the concept with out providing any kind of compensation.
Meghan Markle faces shocking plagiarism allegation
Mel Elliott is the writer of a collection of youngsters’ books that characteristic a personality named Pearl Energy, and she or he claims that Meghan or somebody on her crew sought to steal the idea for his or her present.
“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 advised the Each day 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.”
Legal professionals for Elliott tried to achieve out to the Duchess of Sussex in an effort to make her conscious of “similarities between [her] proposed animation series and [Elliott’s] work,” which they acknowledged had been “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 a single letter.
Elliot says the alleged theft came about after she shared her concepts 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 legal professional for the writer.
Elliott says her authorized crew despatched a complete of three letters to Markle and Netflix about their considerations, however they by no means obtained a response.
Netflix finally axed the present because of “budget cuts.” Elliott says she’s pleased the mission by no means materialized, however she’s nonetheless saddened by the entire scenario.
Elliorr tells the Mail that she’d “glad that Meghan’s ‘Pearl’ show was dropped” and hopes she “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 mentioned.
“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.”
