NEW YORK CITY ― Prince Harry and Meghan Markle ruled the red carpet at the annual Ripple of Hope Gala on Tuesday night, just two days before the official Netflix premiere of their highly anticipated docuseries, Harry & Meghan.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are the recipients of the 2022 Robert F Kennedy Ripple of Hope award.
Kerry Kennedy, president of Robert F Kennedy Human Rights, a nonprofit organisation that is named after her late father and is honouring the couple, spoke about why the Sussexes are being awarded in a press release sent out prior to the event.
“The couple has always stood out for their willingness to speak up and change the narrative on racial justice and mental health around the world,” Kennedy said in an emailed statement. “They embody the type of moral courage that my father once called the ‘one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.’”
The awards, which are being MC-ed by Alec Baldwin, will also honour the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with the Ripple of Hope award. NBA player and civil rights activist Bill Russell, who died in 2022, will also be recognised with a posthumous award.
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Last month, Kennedy shed more light on the couple’s honour in an exclusive interview with the Spanish website El Confidencial.
She told the magazine, via a translated version of the article, that Meghan and Harry “went to the oldest institution in UK history and told them what they were doing wrong, that they couldn’t have structural racism within the institution; that they could not maintain a misunderstanding about mental health”, referencing the couple’s claim of racism within the…
