Meghan and Harry Oprah Interview Aftermath: Live Updates

A year after Meghan Markle married Prince Harry in a fairytale wedding, she said in an extraordinary interview broadcast on Sunday night, her life as a member of the British royal family had become so emotionally sorry that she was planning to kill herself.

At another point, family members told Harry and Meghan, a former biracial actress from the United States, that they did not want the couple’s unborn child Archie to be a prince or a princess, and expressed concerns about how dark the baby’s skin would be.

Meghan, moved but full of self-control, said of her suicidal thoughts: “I was ashamed to have to admit it to Harry. I knew if I didn’t say it, I would. I just didn’t want to be alive anymore.

Meghan, 39, made the revelations in a highly anticipated and sometimes inflammatory CBS interview with Oprah Winfrey that aired in the US in prime time. Describing a royal life that started out as a fairy tale but quickly turned suffocating and cruel, Meghan’s brutal responses raised the combustible questions of race and privilege in the rarest echelon of British society.

Here are the main takeaways from the interview.

Hours after the interview aired in the United States on Sunday, Britain was grappling with the shock wave sweeping across the Atlantic, revealing a deep royal divide.

For some, the interview was a moment to reflect on the decidedly different public figures of Prince Harry and Meghan, as they broke the staunch silence expected of the royal family and brought a more American approach.

But for many black Britons, the interview offered a scathing assessment of the royal family and resurfaced barely submerged tensions over ingrained racism in the country as a whole.

“It’s very difficult to listen to the interview so as not to focus on some of the salacious details and the family drama,” said Marcus Ryder, visiting professor of media diversity at Birmingham City University. “But what we’re talking about is an important part of the British state, it’s a major institution.”

Allegations of racism made during the interview could have major implications for the monarchy, he said, where payments to family members and household expenses are partly funded from public funds.

“Once you realize that and break away from the idea of ​​personal family drama, you have a black woman who was the first, in the modern age at least, to step into this British institution,” Mr Ryder said, “and makes racism allegations all the way up.”

Meghan’s revelation that a member of the Royal Household wondered if her son would be ‘too dark to represent the UK’ was a major issue, he said. (Ms Winfrey said on Monday that Harry asked her to clarify that neither Queen Elizabeth II nor Prince Philip was behind the comment on the skin color.)

The Daily Mail, a British tabloid that lost a confidentiality case to Meghan last month, led Monday morning with the headline in all capitals: “I wanted to kill myself.” Although he brags about Meghan’s comments about her sanity, he called the talk of the breed a ‘sensational pretension’.

Other mainstream media posted biting comments, while some social media users spoke out against the couple’s infidelity to the family and others stood firm for them. The reaction illustrated the divisions between those who view Harry and Meghan as victims and those who disapprove of their behavior and willingness to publicly criticize the monarchy.

The palace did not say anything following the interview. It remains to be seen whether the palace will investigate Harry and Meghan’s allegations as enthusiastically as it has pledged to look into the allegations that Meghan intimidated royal staff.

But many agreed the interview could have far-reaching implications for the Windsor House.

“I’ve always said the royals would come out at best as old-fashioned, out of touch, maybe unwelcoming,” Katie Nicholls, royalty editor at Vanity Fair, said in an interview on Sky News shortly after. diffusion. “But it’s much worse than that.”

In the aftermath of the interview, many black Britons felt some justification, after Meghan and Harry made it clear that racist abuse played a role in their decision to leave the country, but also the frustration that some in Great- Brittany always got around the problem. .

For years, black people have denounced the problematic portrayals of Meghan in the British press and the failure of parts of the British establishment to recognize the problem.

Lawyer and activist Shola Mos-Shogbamimu has frequently denounced the racism directed against Meghan. In a passionate back-and-forth on “Good Morning Britain”, she took Piers Morgan, the journalist and avid critic of Meghan and Harry, to task.

He demanded a reaction to what he called the couple ‘pulverizing his family on global television’ as Prince Philip, Harry’s grandfather, is hospitalized with heart disease.

“You want to deny that the Royal Family has any racist overtones or actions against the biracial first person, just because you’re in love with the Queen?” Dr Mos-Shogbamimu, who is black, responded, as Mr Morgan accused her of “racial harassment”.

“You can love the Queen and be able to speak out against the actions of the Royal Family when they were wrong,” she added.

UK political correspondent Nadine Batchelor-Hunt said Meghan’s treatment – from the British media and also in her allegations of questions about her son’s potential skin color – embodied a deep-rooted racism experienced by black people in Britain. Ms Batcheor-Hunt applauded Meghan’s ‘fearlessness’ and said that as a mixed-race woman, Meghan’s comments resonate deeply.

“In my family, we don’t really care about the monarchy,” Ms. Batchelor-Hunt said. “Many of our ancestors were enslaved under the banner of the British Empire in the name of the crown.”

But allegations of racism within the Royal Family, both Meghan and Harry, had given the Royal Family new relevance, she said.

“Seeing her talk about it so openly is really liberating,” she said, “that’s why I think a lot of young people, especially a lot of black people, care so much.”

Many have noted that the allegations Meghan made during the interview also highlighted a blind spot in much of the UK news media when it comes to race, with the ranks of royal correspondents almost all white.

“It’s a race-based story,” said Marcus Ryder, visiting professor of media diversity at Birmingham City University. “And what we have is we have a British media outlet which has so far been slow to recognize that this is actually a race story.”

Mr Ryder also said the allegations illustrate the incongruity of hereditary white royalty and the UK leaders’ stated commitment to diversity.

“We keep talking about diversity issues, and how does diversity fit in with the hereditary principle?” He asked. “What she’s saying is that there seems to be a conflict.”

For viewers to come together in this time and in this economy for television at a set time – interrupted by even commercials! – requires a high bar.

The odds aren’t known, but tonight many observers recalled Oprah Winfrey’s skill, empathy, and complete command of communication and focus as an interviewer. Even though it was all showbiz, even though it was an act, for viewers it was captivating and moving.

Ms. Winfrey, of course, was one of the creators of interview television when she wasn’t busy winning Tonys, Peabodys, and getting Oscar nominations. “The Oprah Winfrey Show” started in 1986 and ended 25 seasons later with over 5,000 episodes in 2011. She said she interviewed 37,000 people.

It was 1993 when Ms. Winfrey interviewed Michael Jackson in an event that stopped people in their tracks. (Prince Harry was not yet a teenager.) It was the most-watched TV interview in history at the time, with tens of millions of people tuned in. (The New York Times reported 62 million viewers; Ms. Winfrey claimed 90 million worldwide.)

In 2019, she revisited Jackson’s situation, interviewing the two subjects of the documentary “Leaving Neverland”, who accused the singer of having sexually abused them as children.

Reporters on Twitter praised the techniques Ms Winfrey used in the interview, which was both intimate and charged, kind but firm. The power of his attention is fascinating.

Behind the scenes, almost all interviews end the same, Ms Winfrey said in a recent interview herself. The participant, no matter how wealthy or famous, asks, “Were you okay?” How was it? How did I do it? “