The Duchess of Sussex has told Oprah Winfrey that she was silenced by the royal apparatus and that it became clear at a certain point that some were willing to lie to “protect other members of the family.”
She differentiated between parts of the actual members of the royal family and those who worked for them.
“The Queen has always been wonderful to me,” Meghan said.
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The interview special which aired local time on Sunday night (and will be broadcast in Australia on Monday night at 7.30pm AEDT), opened with Meghan describing how naive she was about the ground rules of royal life before she married Prince Harry nearly three years ago.
“I didn’t fully understand what the job was,” she said.
Meghan told Winfrey she was “silenced” when she joined the royal family, while everyone in her circle was instructed to say “no comment” to questions which she said they did.
Among the announcements made in the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s blockbuster interview was the announcement of the gender of their second child.
“It’s a girl,” Prince Harry said.
When Winfrey asked about his reaction, Harry said, “Amazing. Just grateful. To have any child any one or any two would be amazing. But to have a boy and a girl, what more could you ask for?”
The couple also revealed shocking details about how unidentified royals were concerned about how dark her son Archie’s skin would be before his birth and that such worries explained why he was not given the title of prince.
Meghan, whose mother is black and father is white, said she was naive before she married into the royal family in 2018, but that she ended up having suicidal thoughts and considering self harm after asking for help but getting none.
“They didn’t want him to be a prince or princess, not knowing what the gender would be, which would be different from protocol, and that he wasn’t going to receive security,” Meghan said.
“In those months when I was pregnant, all around this same time, so we have in tandem the conversation of, ‘You won’t be given security, not gonna be given a title’ and also concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he’s born.”
She declined to say who had aired such concerns. Asked if she was silent or had been silenced, she replied: “The latter”.
She also noted that she did not know how to curtsy before meeting Queen Elizabeth for the first time, and didn’t realise it would be necessary.
Sunday night’s airing of a two-hour special hosted by Oprah Winfrey will provide the first, and unprecedented, peek into the couple’s departure from royal duties and the strains it has placed on them.
Audiences in the United States are seeing it first; it will not air until Monday night in Britain and Australia.
“I will say I went into it naively because I didn’t grow up knowing much about the royal family,” Meghan said.
“It wasn’t something that was part of conversation at home. It wasn’t something that we followed.”
Meghan said she and Harry were aligned during their courtship because of their “cause-driven” work.
But she did not fully comprehend the pressure of being linked the prestigious royal family.
“It’s easy to have an image of it that is so far from reality,” she said.
And that’s what was really tricky over those past few years, is when the perception and the reality are two very different things. And you’re being judged on the perception, but you’re living the reality of it. There’s a complete misalignment and there’s no way to explain that to people.”
Harry and Meghan’s departure from royal duties began in March 2020 over what they described as the intrusions and racist attitudes of the British media toward the duchess, who is biracial.
Clips released ahead of the airings suggest that at least Meghan will have some pointed criticisms of royal life. In one she describes the royal family as “the firm,” a nickname that is sometimes used affectionately and sometimes critically.
At one point, Winfrey asked Meghan how she felt about Buckingham Palace “hearing you speak your truth today?”.
“I don’t know how they could expect that after all of this time we would still just be silent if there was an active role that the firm is playing in perpetuating falsehoods about us,” she said.
“And if that comes with risk of losing things, I mean, there’s been a lot that’s been lost already.”
In Britain, the interview is seen as poorly timed. It will air while Harry’s 99-year-old grandfather Prince Philip remains hospitalised in London after undergoing a heart procedure.
Royals ‘worried about Archie’s dark skin’
On February 15, Meghan and Harry announced their family was expanding.
“We can confirm that Archie is going to be a big brother,” a spokesman for the couple confirmed to Variety at the time.
“The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are overjoyed to be expecting their second child.”
The couple welcomed their first son, Archie Harrison, in May 2019.
During the interview, Meghan revealed that while she was pregnant with Archie, unidentified royals had “concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he is born”.
The comments, she said, were made to Harry and relayed to her by her husband, and that such worries explained why Archie was not given the title of prince.
But she declined to say who in the royal family voiced those concerns, saying “I think that would be very damaging to them”.
-with AAP
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