Jessica Mulroney Regrets Friendship with Meghan Amid Marital Split

If ever there’s a time when one needs a best friend for a shoulder to cry on, it’s when a previously happy marriage collapses.

That moment came for Canadian socialite and fashionista Jessica Mulroney this week, when it was reported that the 45-year-old had split from her husband, Ben, news that has been circulating for some time in select circles. Gossips in Toronto say Ben walked away from his beautiful wife, and she is deeply upset about how things have worked out.

Jessica, meanwhile, apparently broke the news of the marriage ending to friends when she attended a wedding in Toronto last month, alongside sports icon LeBron James and the singer Drake – alone.

Lawyers are apparently already involved.

Jessica, of course, is best known here for being chief bridesmaid to Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, when she married Prince Harry.

Indeed, so close were the two women that Jessica and her family took on prominent roles at the Royal wedding. Her twin sons, Brian and John, were pageboys – with cheeky, gappy smiles and outfits which were an adorable echo in miniature of Harry’s Blues and Royals frock coat – while daughter Ivy was a bridesmaid alongside Princess Charlotte.

Today, though, the women are best friends no more. Jessica is unlikely to receive any comfort at this difficult time from Montecito. Meghan seemingly dropped Jessica after she became entangled in a distressing and highly publicised online race row with a blogger in 2020, more of which later.

In contrast, at the time Jessica’s husband, son of the late Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, appeared to back his wife to the hilt. He even left his job as a television presenter at the height of the row in support of her.

Despite those efforts, now the marriage is over.

A source said this week: ‘That whole incident later caused tensions, even in her marriage.’

Yet surprisingly, at root, one well-placed source says that Jessica herself traces her current unhappiness back not to her bruising online scandal – but to that glorious day in 2018 when she watched her then best friend walk down the aisle of St George’s Chapel in Windsor.

So much so that now, rather than looking back on her brush with history with pride, a perfectly placed source reveals: ‘Jessica says now that she somewhat regrets becoming friends with Meghan.

‘While she enjoyed all the exposure it brought her at the time, that same exposure is what caused her social media rift to blow up in the way it did and led to the end of her friendship with Meghan and her marriage.’

The source adds: ‘If she could go back, a part of her wishes she was never part of that wedding.

‘She really did consider Meghan family. But now she sees that whole time as a “dark cloud”’.

Married for 16 years, Jessica and Ben were a ‘power couple’ in Toronto, a status fuelled by Jessica posting glossy scenes of domestic perfection featuring her handsome husband, their sons, now 14, and daughter, now 12.

What she showed was a high-status family life, enviable in every way – from her endless parade of designer clothes and perfect hair to the family’s large house complete with a gigantic shoe closet and azure swimming pool.

Over the past few months, however, her Instagram account has provided pointers to the current state of affairs. She hasn’t been wearing her wedding ring in social media posts – not since March. At that point, she and Ben were clearly still a couple as she joked about them forgetting their wedding anniversary, again, and also posted a picture of him eating cake at home to wish him Happy Birthday.

However, by May things seemed to have deteriorated. Ben wished his own mother a happy Mother’s Day, but didn’t mention his wife.

Indeed, his last mention of Jessica on his Instagram was back in 2023, when they attended a charity event together.

As for Jessica, her most recent post in June is a striking black and white portrait of herself. She looks sombre, and as if she has lost a lot of weight – and she was tiny before.

Was this image her way of marking her new beginnings as a single woman?

Neither she nor Ben responded to requests for comment this week.

It’s a sad ending for a couple who first met when he was 17 and she just 14.

They had been married for six years when Jessica met Meghan in 2014. Jessica, a stylist who had been dubbed ‘the fairy godmother of Canadian fashion’ by Harper’s Bazaar, already had significant social cachet, working for the then First Lady Sophie Trudeau among others.

Meghan, meanwhile, was divorced from her first husband, producer Trevor Engelson, dating celebrity chef Cory Vitiello and living in Toronto where she was filming Suits.

Theirs was a female friendship which seemed to match two women with identical outlooks and ambitions.

Well-connected gossip columnist Shinan Govani told me: ‘The Jessica Mulroney relationship was key in that it opened up Meghan’s world. It’s what connected her to people like [the then Canadian premier] Justin Trudeau and Sophie, and also to Markus Anderson, the global membership director of Soho House.’

With stylish Jessica at her side, Meghan turned from a jobbing LA actress to a more sophisticated figure. They even took a ‘girl squad’ trip to Europe together in 2015, which Jessica called a #fakehoneymoon, adding ‘Happy wife happy life’ to images she posted accompanying the trip.

It was towards the end of that vacation that Meghan had her first date with Prince Harry. And when news of the royal romance broke in 2016, Jessica helped Meghan get to London, secretly, to be with him.

In the book Finding Freedom, author Omid Scobie says Jessica arranged for Meghan to use the private jet of the Canadian real-estate power couple Krystal Koo and Michael Cooper: ‘Long-time friends of Jessica’s, the couple… were more than happy to help.’

Indeed, as time went on, Jessica became intimately involved in Meghan’s romance with Harry. As revealed in the blockbuster Netflix documentary Harry & Meghan, Meghan was FaceTiming her when Prince Harry was about to propose. The programme showed Meghan squeaking: ‘Oh my God, Jess, it’s happening.’

Jessica helped to style Meghan for her engagement photocall, and later travelled with her on her first Royal tour to Australia, again as a stylist but also as a best friend and sounding board.

The scandal that enveloped Jessica came out of a clear blue sky in June 2020 when Sasha Exeter, a black lifestyle blogger from Toronto, posted a 12-minute Instagram video. In it she said that Jessica had threatened her in private, and called her out for ‘white privilege’.

The two women had been messaging in private after Exeter implored everyone to speak out in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Jessica seemingly then reacted badly when she was criticised by Exeter for a post promoting her television show.

Exeter said Jessica then bombarded her with ‘offensive messages’, including a threat that she had spoken to companies that worked with her. She called the behaviour ‘a threat to my livelihood’ and an ‘attempt to silence a black woman during this movement behind closed doors’.

Jessica quickly posted a public apology, saying: ‘I need to acknowledge and understand [Exeter’s experience]. I am unequivocally sorry for not doing that with you, and for any hurt I caused. As I told you privately, I have lived a very public and personal experience with my closest friend where race was front and centre.’

Note the reference to Meghan.

But – according to Exeter – Jessica then sent her another post which read: ‘Liable [sic} suit. Good luck.’ This, apparently, was a threat to sue her for libel.

The flame was then well and truly lit, and Exeter then wrote: ‘Here’s what happens when you call out someone with privilege and wealth. They publicly apologise on your post to preserve their image while privately threaten a lawsuit to try and shut you up.’

Every company Jessica worked with dropped her. She was axed from her regular appearances on Good Morning America and the Canadian network CTV dropped her reality wedding show I Do, Redo.

As her life crumbled, her husband’s on-air colleague Elaine Lui rather cruelly accused her of using Meghan as her ‘superpower’ – presumably a reference to Jessica using Meghan’s experience with racism as part of her defence.

Ben then opted to step away from his job at etalk, an entertainment news programme, saying in a statement: ‘More than ever, we need more Black voices, more Indigenous voices, more people of colour in the media as well as every other profession – and that is why I have decided to immediately step away from my role at etalk to create space for a new perspective and a new voice.’

Three months after the scandal, Jessica gave an interview in which she said: ‘I am not racist’. She also spoke of her hopes to move on, but admitted: ‘I still feel a lot of shame. I feel that people believe the worst in me.’

She added: ‘I had a hard time dealing with the fact that a network like CTV [and] the companies I’ve worked with for many years – and journalists, some of which [sic] were my friends – spoke with incredible authority on what they believed had happened without even contacting me. I think that hurt the most.’

She also denied ever exploiting her connection to Meghan.

At the time, sources said that the friendship was not what it once was, but not because of the scandal. ‘Of course Meghan has been worried about Jess. She’ll always have love for her,’ said one in 2020. Jessica herself said that the Duchess ‘constantly FaceTimes and checks up on me’.

But in truth the friendship quietly ended pretty much on the spot. Today Meghan – who once left baby Archie with Jessica when she went on a trip to the UK – no longer sees or speaks to her. Any public praise, like the gushing statement she previously made about Jessica on her blog The Tig calling her ‘savvy and fashionable and très cool, and also va va va voom pritaaaaay’, has been notably absent.

For her part, Jessica no longer follows Meghan or her brands on Instagram.

In the wake of the scandal, it was widely reported that Jessica had to resort to antidepressants. One source told the media said that anxiety she had been dealing with since she was 12 had turned into severe depression and suicidal thoughts. So dark was her mood, her mother had to come to care for her.

A source said: ‘Jess couldn’t talk without crying. She didn’t feel like herself on the meds and she didn’t want to talk to anyone. She could barely respond to a text message.’

Ben was quoted as telling a friend at the time: ‘I would wake up and Jess wouldn’t be in bed, and my mind would go to the worst.’

She later admitted she ‘never thought I’d have to go through intense treatment the way I did this year’, and said she’d found hope and happiness through ‘sobriety and therapy’.

She went on: ‘It can be lonely having the world, friends distance from you and not even ask how you are. But, thankfully, you find the things that truly matter….’

One of these things was her marriage. Ben wrote a glowing post of praise two months later, in October 2021, saying: ‘Nothing and no one gives me more joy or fills me with more pride or stirs in me more passion or embraces me with more love than this woman.

‘Jessie, you are my everything… now that I have you, I am never letting you go. I love you, Sweet sweet.’

But Ben – once a darling of the liberal Left who has now pivoted to become a Right-wing shock jock – has seemingly decided it’s time to cut his ‘everything’ loose.

As for Jessica’s one time best friend, Meghan?

Well, she apparently delivered the coup de grace to their association earlier this year when actress and comedian Mindy Kaling – Jessica’s most famous client before Meghan – was invited on to her lifestyle TV show, With Love Meghan. Was it a message to her former friend? As one source puts it with some restraint: ‘That seemed very cruel.’