Why Serena Williams has been ‘relying' on Meghan Markle

The former actress met the tennis professional in 2010 at a charity football match in 2014, and now Serena has revealed the pair sweetly rely on each other to this day.

Speaking as part of an interview on The Sunday Project, Serena told Lisa Wilkinson the two women are in regular contact for emotional support.

“We were actually just texting each other this morning,” she revealed.

“We have known each other for a long time, but we really kind of are relying on each other right a lot recently.”

Meghan Markle‘s friendship with Serena Williams goes back years before she became a royal, and a recent interview has proved the pair are as close as ever.

Both Serena and Meghan have had their fair share of challenges over the past year so it’s no wonder the famous pair need to lean on one another.

At the US Open earlier this month, Serena challenged an umpire after he accused her of cheating during a match against Naomi Osaka.

She received a code violation warning following the row, which culminated in Serena smashing a racket.

Meanwhile, Meghan’s year has been something of a mixed bag; her May 19 wedding to Prince Harry was marred by family trouble.

Days before her royal wedding to Prince Harry, Meghan’s father Thomas Markle Sr – who was due to walk her down the aisle – dropped out of the wedding party due to reported heart problems.

Over the summer, Thomas did a number of interviews with the press, including The Mail on Sunday, where he claimed Meghan had “cut [him] off completely”.

It could be that the two women, given their longstanding friendship, have relied on each other for support during these challenging periods.

This isn’t the first time Serena has spoken about her friendship with Meghan.

In an interview with Vanity Fair in 2017, Serena revealed the advice she had once given to her friend: “I told her, ‘You’ve got to be who you are, Meghan. You can’t hide.'”

Meghan, too, chronicled her friendship with Serena on her now deleted website The Tig, writing: “We hit it off immediately, taking pictures, laughing through the flag football game we were both playing in, and chatting not about tennis or acting, but about all the good old fashioned girly stuff. So began our friendship.”

More recently, she supported Serena by going to watch her play in the women’s final Wimbledon.

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