Meghan Markle Appears to Contradict Claim She Grew Up a ‘Latchkey Kid’ After ‘Masterchef’ Appearance

Meghan Markle‘s recollections of her childhood keep shifting — and fans have noticed.

The comparison started on TikTok, where the account @royal_highlights posted a side-by-side of two Markle moments on Thursday, July 30, captioning it: “Her backstory changes faster than the TikTok algorithm. Total story chameleon!”

The first clip came from a March 2025 episode of With Love, Meghan, Markle’s Netflix lifestyle series, titled “Welcome to the Party,” in which Mindy Kaling visited Montecito to help plan a kid-friendly tea party. While cutting bread into star shapes, Markle, 44, described growing up as “a latchkey kid.”

“I grew up with a lot of fast food, also a lot of TV tray dinners,” she explained at the time. “It feels like such a different time but that was so normal – the microwave kids meals that had compartmentalized [sections] – do you remember them?”

Kaling, 47, replied, “I thought those were delicious as a child,” to which Markle added, “I grew up with that, watching Jeopardy! and having a lot of fast food.”

The second clip is far more recent: Markle appeared as a guest judge on an episode of MasterChef Australia that aired Sunday, July 26, sharing a very different memory of her upbringing. “I grew up in California and so as you know we have incredible produce, so I think you just really start to love farm to table at an early age,” she said. “My mom’s an incredible cook and I grew up watching so many cooking shows.”

The contrast set off a wave of criticism in the TikTok comments section. “Can’t keep track of her own lies,” one user wrote, while another said, “That’s not what a latchkey kid was.” A third added, “The liars are the ones who get on.”

One commenter broke down the discrepancy in detail: “Eating fast food is totally normal for any kid, but the ‘latchkey’ timeline still doesn’t add up. A latchkey kid by definition goes home to an empty house because of a lack of childcare. If she was personally chaperoned by her father on a Hollywood set every day after school, she simply wasn’t a latchkey kid, regardless of what was on her dinner plate.” (Markle’s father Thomas was a former television lighting director, who worked on General Hospital and Married… with Children.)

However, not every comment was critical. “I feel like both can be true,” one person offered, and another wrote, “she’s so genuine, it’s really refreshing to have someone like her on tv.”

Markle shares children Prince Archie, 7, and Princess Lilibet, 5, with her husband, Prince Harry, whom she married in 2018. The family lives in Montecito, California, where they relocated after stepping back from their roles as senior working members of the British royal family in 2020.