Meghan Markle is in the middle of a legal battle with the British tabloids and recently admitted how difficult the negative media attention directed at her since she married Prince Harry has been. But over here in the U.S., she’s racking up high-profile supporters, like Beyoncé, Serena Williams, and Ellen DeGeneres. Former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is also a big fan.

“Oh my God, I want to hug her!” Clinton, no stranger to being derided in the press, said in a recent interview with BBC Radio 5. “I feel as a mother I just want to put my arms around her. I want to hug her. I want to tell her to hang in there and don’t let those bad guys get you down. Keep going, do what you think is right.” She even offered some techniques for dealing with the public pressure, like humor and deflection—but added “it is tough what she’s going through and she deserves a lot better.”

“I have a great deal of feeling toward and about her [Meghan] because it’s one thing to be told what it will be like when you step onto the biggest stage with the brightest spotlight, joining the royal family…and yet it still is really hard to imagine,” Clinton continued. “It takes some getting used to, to have your every move scrutinized and analyzed, and frankly things made up about.nAnd I really wish her and her husband the very best because they are struggling to have a life of meaning and integrity on their own terms—and that’s hard enough if you’re just walking around in today’s world, but if you’re on that big a platform, it’s really difficult.”

Clinton also said that she thinks race and gender do play a part in the coverage of Markle. “I don’t think there’s any doubt of it,” she said. “I think even if you go back and look at social media from the time the engagement was announced, race was clearly an element in it. And to think that some of your, what we could call mainstream media, actually allowed that to be printed in their pages, or amplified, was heartbreaking and wrong.”

“She is an amazing young woman. She has an incredible life story. She has stood up for herself. She’s made her own way in the world. And then she falls in love and he falls in love with her, and everybody should be celebrating that because it is a true love story,” Clinton said. A young Meghan Markle, of course, famously wrote the then-First Lady a letter as part of her campaign to get a sexist dishwashing soap ad changed when she was just 11. (Spoiler: It worked.)

Here’s hoping these two amazing women can get together to work on a charitable project together soon—or at least meet up for a glass of wine.

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