Back in December 2022, it seemed like the world was tuning into Netflix’s “Harry and Meghan” docuseries.
But YouTuber Shallon Lester was not one of them.
That is, until friends started telling her that she was featured in the fifth episode of the six-part series which chronicled the couple’s relationship and highly publicized departure from royal life.
“At first I thought they were hallucinating because why on earth would I be in it,” Lester told The Post. “Especially since I wasn’t called for comment. No one reached out to my team. Nothing.”
After she saw the segment, which insinuated that she was part of a coordinated online smear campaign against the Sussexes, particularly Meghan Markle, Lester was “truly blown away.”
“My first text was to my mother. My second was to my lawyer,” Lestor recalled.
“I assumed when I heard I was in this it was going to be ‘a bunch of people who were mean to us on the internet.’ Yes, I am mean to them on the internet. That’s my right. It’s an opinion channel.”
However, Lester claimed, the docuseries smeared her with more serious accusations that were false, defamatory and have affected her content creation business.
After end of the couple’s $20 Spotify deal last week, Lester addressed her 378,000 youtube subscribers about how she believes she was treated in the documentary.
“It’s defamation, it’s slander, it’s mischaracterization. And you know what else it is? Misinformation,” she said in the video, adding that she was pursuing legal action, “I’ll nail their asses to the wall.”
The bit in question was an interview with Bot Sentinel CEO Christopher Bouzy, who said they were able to trace 70 percent of the online hate against Markle to just 83 twitter accounts.
The culprits, Bouzy said, were “middle aged, Caucasian women.” As the film broke down the statistics, three different women were flashed across the screen. They were not identified by name, but Lester was one of them.
The journalist-turned-YouTuber, who mostly opines on dating and celebrity, said she watched the docuseries with a man she was seeing at the time, and likened it to him taking in a Jeffrey Epstein documentary and seeing his face flash across the screen.
“It’s guilt by association. It’s an obvious implication and it’s completely unfounded,” she told The Post.
“Their story didn’t make sense. They couldn’t provide one shred of evidence. If I am influencing millions of people, where?
“Show me. Is there a DM? A portion in one of my videos? An email blast? It doesn’t exist because it didn’t happen. We live in the age of receipts. Nothing anyone does is without a footprint. But they can’t find one.”
Lester has a protected Twitter account, meaning only her 13.7k followers can read it. “And I haven’t tweeted in four years,” she said.
In the aftermath, Lester said her Instagram direct messages and YouTube comments were flooded with personal attacks from fans of the Sussexes.
“And I have noticed a distinct downturn in brand outreach after the documentary,” Lester claimed.
But, she claimed, the segment was also highly hypocritical, given the two’s self-appointed status as experts on “misinformation.”
“I find it hilarious that they flat out say, they are qualified to tackle the thorny topic of misinformation. But they are the number one purveyors of it. They are qualified to distribute it. But are they qualified to dismantle it? No.”
Lester is very transparent about criticizing the pair, mostly because they cling onto their personal victimhood.
“I pride myself on being upfront and very blunt. I don’t operate in the shadows. I don’t have finsta (fake Instagram accounts). I comment on Reddit under my name,” she said.
“I walk it like I talk it. For them to imply that I am doing things in a shady way? I am the wall that bull s–t breaks against. It stops with me.”
She noted that elsewhere in the docuseries, producers were criticized for using stock footage, including one photograph of a Harry Potter premiere they did not attend, to claim their lives were infiltrated by paparazzi.
“It seemed like they were stitching together things or ideas that were in the ether to create this narrative of persecution,” she said.
“They could have been the coolest, most glamorous, most diverse couple in the world. But they chose this victimhood narrative. It was a choice. And the simplest answer is the one they don’t want to face is that they are simply unlikable.”
While Lester has yet to formally take legal action, she and her attorney are currently “fact finding, doing research and getting our ducks in a row.”
Harry and Meghan’s $100 million Netflix deal is the last part of their attempt at a empire and the documentary is so far all they have produced for it. A second doc, on his Invictus Games for wounded service personnel, is due to be released in August.
The Post reached out to reps for Netflix and the Sussexes but received no reply.
Lester is confident that the truth is on her side, and she will see a resolution.
“First and foremost, an apology is in order. And moreover, I think these people need to be held to some degree of accountability for the statements they make and the accusations they levy,” she said adding,
“But money would be nice too.”
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