The British royal family has a long history of hazing newcomers — particularly women who date relatives — and only those who are “tough as nails” tend to survive, a cousin of King Charles III said in an exclusive interview with The Post.
“I say to Meghan Markle, ‘What you’re going through is a hellish hazing,’ said Christina Oxenberg, a descendant of Serbian royalty whom King Charles III considers a third cousin. someone else who can stand it. Nobody gets a pass.” Including, she added, Kate Middleton.
Oxenberg, 59, is a writer and fashion designer and the younger sister of actress Catherine Oxenberg. Their mother is Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, who, Oxenberg said, was once very close to Charles.
Oxenberg, who lived most of her life with the British royal family, remembers the snobbery once whispered behind the new Princess of Wales’s back.
When Prince William, now the heir apparent, dated Kate Middleton before their 2011 wedding, the royal family thought it was quite funny that the British press called her “Kate Middle Class,” Oxenberg said.
According to the Express, Camilla – now the queen consort – would refer to Middleton’s parents, Carole and Michael, as “Meet the Fockers.”
“They all thought it was really funny — Kate Middle Class and Sarah Ferguson and Koo Stark,” Oxenberg said. “They didn’t mean disrespect; she is, after all, the future Queen of England.”
Stark, an American actress and photographer, dated Prince Andrew for 18 months in the early 1980s before his mother, Queen Elizabeth, ended the relationship. Though she initially loved Stark, who bought Andrew his first pair of jeans, the monarch quickly intervened when the British press discovered the actress’s appearances in soft-core porn films, making her an unlikely match for the Prince.
“It was a very meager reason,” Oxenberg told The Post. “There’s a great example of how you can suffer as a royal for no good reason.”
“They were both really in love,” she added of Andrew and Stark. “They were soul mates and he was not allowed to marry his soul mate. If he’d married her, today would have been different.’
Andrew, who was married to Sarah Ferguson from 1986 to 1996, befriended convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein — and in March the prince settled a lawsuit with prosecutor Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who reportedly paid her $12 million after saying she was forced to sleep with him three times when she was 17.
Oxenberg herself admitted she was a former confidante of British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, who is appealing a 20-year sentence after her conviction for helping get young women and girls for Jeffrey Epstein.
Among the other now-royals who received their share of hazing, Oxenberg said, was Princess Michael of Kent, née Marie Christine von Reibnitz, a baroness of Czech/German descent.
When Prince Michael of Kent, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, married von Reibnitz in 1978, the British royal family was delighted to give her a hard time, Oxenberg told The Post.
“She was treated the same as Meghan [has been] treated – with this ridicule and disrespect,” she said. ‘We always mocked her because she kept calling the royal family ‘delicious cousins’. It [the hazing] was all done out of habit and not full of hatred and violent conspiracy. I was a witness.”
Oxenberg was then 16 years old and went through her own trials and tribulations with her mother, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, a great-nephew of King Charles III. While still married to Howard Oxenberg, a New York clothing manufacturer, Princess Elizabeth became engaged to the actor Richard Burton while he was between marriages to Elizabeth Taylor. (Burton and the princess never married.)
With Meghan, who married Prince Harry in 2018, the hazing was particularly brutal, according to Oxenberg. “They’re tough, they’re tough on foreigners,” she said. “It’s not about your skin color, it’s about being a foreigner.”
Still, she called Meghan’s treatment by both the British press – who analyze her every move, especially during Queen Elizabeth’s funeral on Monday – and some members of the royal family as nothing short of “treacherous.”
“She’s Harry’s wife,” Oxenberg said. “By their own standards, they have called it a class system. They came up with that system, [by which] you have to respect Harry’s choice.”