Britain’s royal family was facing a once-in-a-generation crisis on Monday after Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, rocked the institution with a litany of devastating allegations in their eagerly awaited interview with Oprah Winfrey.
Over the course of the two-hour special, the couple – who despite their royal split still sit five relatives away from the throne – painted a picture of a family so stubbornly rooted in its ways that it left a young, bi-racial couple alone to fend off racist abuse and their own troubled mental health, forcing them into silence and ultimately leaving them with no option but to flee the palace’s clutches.
Meghan said she was so isolated and lonely while working as a royal that she contemplated suicide, telling Winfrey she “just didn’t want to be alive anymore.” The couple were intensely critical of the way the institution treated them, and Meghan revealed a staggering allegation of racism from a member of the clan that threatens to throw its reputation into crisis.
Harry meanwhile admitted his relationships with his father and heir to the throne, Prince Charles, and his brother, Prince William, have come under severe strain in recent years, and suggested the institution may have planted stories in the media that cast him and Meghan in a negative light.
‘I just didn”t want to be alive anymore’
The palace faced storms on multiple fronts by sunrise in London on Monday.
The interview had been relentlessly previewed in the media over recent days, drawing comparisons with a royal tell-all given by Harry’s mother, Princess Diana, in 1995, which shed light on the breakdown of her marriage to Charles.
But the revelations in Sunday’s broadcast may have dwarfed even those in magnitude, as Harry and Meghan’s scorched-earth confessional posed problem after problem for palace staffers and senior royals.
Perhaps the most pertinent was Meghan’s allegation that an unnamed family member had asked about Archie’s skin color and “what that would mean or look like.” She said those discussions were relayed to her from Harry.
Harry declined to name the family member but said he was “a bit shocked” by the conversation. Winfrey said on CBS on Monday morning that “it was not his grandmother nor his grandfather that were part of those conversations.” In Britain, the shadow education secretary, Kate Green, said Buckingham Palace should launch an investigation.
Palace officials are also scrambling to respond to claims from both Duke and Duchess that their pleas for help with their mental wellbeing and security were ignored by the institution.
Fighting back tears at one point, Meghan said her thoughts of suicide were incredibly difficult to bear, and she was reticent to share them with her husband. “But I knew that if I didn’t say it, that I would do it – and I just didn’t want to be alive anymore,” she said.
Harry, whose mother Diana was killed when he was a boy, said he was “terrified” by his wife’s admission. The prince, who is sixth in line to the throne, said there is a culture of suffering in silence in the royal family. But Meghan’s race and the abuse she endured made the situation even more difficult for the couple, and their perceived lack of support ultimately led, above all other factors, to their dramatic decision to quit as working royals in January 2020.
They described in emotional detail the most difficult moments – Meghan revealing her thoughts to Harry hours before they were due to go to an event; the Prince arriving home from work each day to find his wife crying while breastfeeding their newborn – and said a “lack of support and lack of understanding” were the reasons they chose to step away.
Meghan said the situation was exacerbated by often racist and “outdated, colonial undertones” that repeatedly appeared in coverage of the couple in Britain’s notoriously vitriolic tabloids. Both described a toxic blend of press intrusion, bitterness on social media and isolation from a support structure.
Harry added that he pushed the issue with the royal family. He told Winfrey he believed there were many opportunities for the palace to “show some public support” in the face of continued racial abuse in the press, “yet no one from my family ever said anything. That hurts.”
“I regret believing them when they said I would be protected,” Meghan told Winfrey.
CNN has reached out to the royal family for comment. (CNN)
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