After weeks of promotion and fervent speculation about what might be revealed, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s “no question off limits” interview with Oprah Winfrey aired on CBS Sunday night. Starting with how little she knew about the royals when she first started dating Harry and leading to the intense media coverage that surrounded her once she became a royal, the interview, as promised, was wide-ranging and deeply personal.
Though there were reportedly concerns with Buckingham Palace that Meghan might criticize the royals, or even the Queen, she shared exclusively warm anecdotes about her time with the monarch, including sharing a lap blanket on their way to a joint engagement. “The queen has always been wonderful to me,” Meghan said. “I really loved being in her company.”
Oprah pressed for details on the long-rumored “rift” between Meghan and Kate Middleton, including the much-speculated-about incident over flower girl dresses before Meghan and Harry’s wedding. Meghan confirmed that it really was a conversation about flower girl dresses, and someone really did make someone else cry— except “the reverse happened.” Careful to emphasize that Kate “is a good person” and did what Meghan says she would have done in that situation—sent flowers and apologized— Meghan said “what was hard to get over was being blamed for something that not only I didn’t do but that happened to me. Everyone in the institution knew it wasn’t true.”
She also said that when people involved in planning her wedding offered to go on the record to set the story straight when it hit the tabloids months later, they were told not to. “Why not?” asked Oprah. “That’s a good question,” Meghan responded, with a meaningful pause.
Later in the interview, she called the narrative around her supposedly making Kate cry “the beginning of a real character assassination.”
Meghan kept returning to conflicts she had with palace staff, from clarifying rumors to going to lunch with her friends. The emphasis within the palace, she said, was to manage how things looked in public. “I know there’s an obsession with how things like, has anyone talked about how it feels,” she said. When she was pregnant with Archie, she said, she also pushed back against palace officials who said he wouldn’t receive a security detail if he did not have a royal title. Meghan emphasized that she didn’t want a title for him, but told the staffers, “We haven’t created this monster machine around us in terms of clickbait and avoid offer. You’ve allowed that to happen, which means our son needs to be safe.”
Without naming specific people, Meghan also cited concerns within the palace before Archie’s about “how dark his skin might be when he was born.” She said it happened in several conversations, and declined to tell Oprah who mentioned it because “I think that would be very damaging to them.” But she did say the conversations were between Harry and “family.”
In a clip released before the interview aired, Oprah told Meghan that she had first requested the interview around the time she was a guest at Meghan and Harry’s 2018 wedding, but was told the moment wasn’t right. To say things have changed since then would be a dramatic understatement. This is the first interview Harry and Meghan have given since their early-2020 decision to step down as senior royals, which was followed by a move to Vancouver and later Santa Barbara, where they purchased a $14.7 million home and became Oprah’s neighbors.
As promised when they first announced their exit as senior royals, Harry and Meghan have worked to become financially independent, signing a blockbuster deal with Netflix in addition to signaling their plans to give paid speeches when the pandemic is over. They have also continued their charity work, including with the patronages they have kept on from their time as working royals and with organizations in Los Angeles, including Homeboy Industries and Baby2Baby.
From the moment the Oprah interview was announced, royal sources have revealed the anxiety inside Buckingham Palace about what the interview might reveal. Making matters worse, the interview aired hours after a special Commonwealth Day service that featured appearances by the queen, Prince Charles, and other senior royals. “The palace is hoping the service will get plenty of media coverage because Commonwealth Day is incredibly important to the queen,” a source told Vanity Fair. “She won’t be happy if anything overshadows it.”
As CBS released clips of the interview, in which Oprah confirmed that “there is no subject that is off-limits,” the concerns within the palace went public. On Tuesday The Times of London published a story unveiling allegations that Meghan had bullied her palace staffers, and the reason for their timing was clear: “The sources approached The Times because they felt that only a partial version had emerged of Meghan’s two years as a working member of the royal family and they wished to tell their side, concerned about how such matters are handled by the Palace,” wrote the paper’s reporter, Valentine Low.
The bullying allegations were more than two years old, but appeared to flare up old tensions. Sources told Page Six that Prince William and Kate didn’t “want to get involved in this public bitch fest” and “they don’t wish to elevate this soap opera.” After Meghan’s attorneys sent a letter to The Times claiming that they were “being used by Buckingham Palace to peddle a wholly false narrative,” a palace source told Vanity Fair, “That is untrue and disingenuous. Our focus has been on more important things than the circus surrounding the Oprah interview.” And on Wednesday Buckingham Palace announced in an official statement that it would open an investigation into the bullying allegations. “The Royal Household has had a Dignity at Work policy in place for a number of years and does not and will not tolerate bullying or harassment in the workplace,” the statement read in part.
As Vanity Fair has previously reported, the relationship between Meghan and Harry and the palace is at an “all-time low,” and some palace staffers are comparing it to the period in the early 1990s when Charles and Diana’s staff would brief the media against each other. “There’s a feeling that the drama needs to come to an end,” a source told Vanity Fair last week. “This is being turned into a P.R. battle that’s being played out in the press like the War of the Waleses. It seems unlikely there would be this level of detail without it being sanctioned by someone at the palace.
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