The Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) has announced it has launched an investigation over Jeremy Clarkson’s now-infamous column about Meghan Markle.
In December 2022, Clarkson faced a widespread backlash over an article he penned in The Sun, describing how much he “hates” the Duchess of Sussex on a “cellular level”.
Alluding to a scene from Game Of Thrones, the former Top Gear host wrote in the piece that he “dreamed” of the day she’d be “made to parade naked through the streets” while crowds “throw lumps of excrement at her”.
The Sun later issued an apology over the column – which sparked over 25,000 complaints to Ipso, becoming the most complained-about piece in its history – and pulled it from their website at Clarkson’s request.
On Thursday afternoon, Ipso confirmed it is taking forward two groups of complaints, from the women’s rights charities The Fawcett Society and the Wilde Foundation, who claimed they were affected by breaches in accuracy, harassment and discrimination.
Ipso added that the results of the investigation would be made public.
Clarkson initially responded to the backlash with a post on Twitter that stopped short of an actual apology.
However, almost a month later, Clarkson did apologise publicly, and claimed he’d also emailed the Duke and Duchess of Sussex over Christmas to say sorry to them privately.
“Usually, I read what I’ve written to someone else before filing, but I was home alone on that fateful day, and in a hurry,” he wrote on Instagram.
“So when I’d finished, I just pressed send. And then, when the column appeared the next day, the land mine exploded.”
A statement issued by the couple’s spokesperson in response to Clarkson’s now-deleted Instagram post stated that he had only written to Prince Harry, and not to his wife.
“While a new public apology has been issued today by Mr Clarkson, what remains to be addressed is his long standing pattern of writing articles that spread hate rhetoric, dangerous conspiracy theories, and misogyny,” a representative said.
“Unless each of his other pieces were also written ‘in a hurry’, as he states, it is clear that this is not an isolated incident shared in haste, but rather a series of articles shared in hate.”