Two months after announcing that they would abandon their roles as members of senior royalty, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle moved from Vancouver Island to southern California, where they have lived since November 2019.
Before settling in their home in Montecito, an isolated and expensive community in Santa Barbara County, last summer, they stayed in a Beverly Hills mansion owned by Tyler Perry. They filed a invasion of privacy process against tabloid photographers, saying paparazzi flew drones over the house to capture images of their son, Archie.
In Montecito, the couple is a neighbor of Oprah Winfrey and Markle sent Oprah a Christmas gift basket with superlatte mixes of Clevr oat milk. (Markle invested in Clevr last year.)
In a recent interview with James Corden, Harry said he didn’t have much of a chance to see Los Angeles because he, Meghan and Archie were at home locked up. He also said he has received calls from Zoom with his grandparents, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. They have also been making a lot of organic waffles with the waffle maker the Queen sent Archie for Christmas.
In September, they announced that they had founded a production company and signed a multi-year contract with Netflix; in December, they announced that they signed an agreement with Spotify to produce a podcast through their organization, Archewell. But Oprah’s interview this weekend is the first major piece of content to be released this year.
Oprah did this in the same way that she overcame child poverty in rural Mississippi to become the world’s first billionaire black woman: time, effort and an excess of natural charisma. In a video clip released on Friday, Oprah recalls that he called Meghan for the first time to propose an interview in “February or March 2018”. According to The Times of London, the two met in person that March, when Oprah “met in London” as one of them, “and was invited by Meghan to meet her at Kensington Palace”, as one is.
In April, Oprah invited Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, to lunch and yoga at her home. Approximately two months of knowledge were enough to give Oprah an invitation to Meghan and Harry’s wedding.
Days after the couple announced their intention to “back off” as senior royalty, Oprah released a statement denying rumors that he had advised them on a course of action. Meghan and Harry ended up moving so close to Oprah’s property in Montecito, California, that they could be called neighbors, which is actually how Oprah referred to Meghan in a December Instagram post enthusiastically endorsing a latte brand where Meghan had recently become an investor.
Earlier in the week, national eyebrows rose over the moment when the Sussexes trotted to tell everything on television when Prince Philip was seriously ill at the hospital.
But then came the blatantly preventive bomb in the form of a Times of London story, which accused the couple of intimidating domestic staff. And then came the familiar déjà vu to watch the same very white, very middle age, very masculine line-up of traditional British media types line up to “defend the honor of the royal family”, verbally attacking a pregnant woman who has been the target of relentless racist defamation over the years.
As the Guardian’s Marina Hyde said, “Unfortunately, no matter how ridiculous anything Meghan and Harry do – and they are often ridiculous – it will never, never be a hundredth as ridiculous as the behavior of those who foaming at the mouth about it.”
This is not, in fact, the only real news happening.
Queen Elizabeth’s 99-year-old husband, Prince Philip (Harry’s grandfather), was hospitalized for more than two weeks after feeling ill.
The queen’s middle son, Prince Andrew, remains in exile from public office years after becoming involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking controversy. It has been reported that Andrew, who has so far refused requests from the American authorities to interview him, will not be allowed to join the rest of the royal family on a porch at Buckingham Palace at the Queen’s birthday parade.
When Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, present their side of a sensational real break for Oprah Winfrey from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm on Sunday night’s east, it will surely be one of the most anticipated and most intense television interviews in recent memory.
Harpo Productions, of CBS and Oprah Winfrey, fueled expectations for the two-hour prime-time program from CBS and CBS.com, which will air in Britain on Monday night on the ITV network, with hidden snippets that they show her sitting with Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, in a relaxed outdoor setting, but they offer only a few glimpses of what they are talking about.
“Were you silent or were you silenced?” Mrs. Winfrey asks at one point, while Meghan looks at her, but says nothing. “You said very shocking things here,” she says in another, as dramatic music begins to emerge.
Harry, who will join Meghan in the second half of the interview, appears briefly in an excerpt to say, “My biggest concern was history repeating itself.” This is an apparent reference to the fate of his mother, Princess Diana, who died in a car accident in Paris in 1997, after a high-speed chase involving photographers.