Result of the interview with Meghan and Harry Oprah: live updates

A year after Meghan Markle married Prince Harry at a fairytale wedding, she said in an extraordinary interview broadcast on Sunday night, her life as a member of the British royal family became so emotionally desolate that she thought of suicide. .

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

An emotional but controlled Meghan said of her suicidal thoughts: “I was ashamed to admit this to Harry. I knew that if I didn’t say it, I would. I just didn’t want to be alive anymore. “

Meghan, 39, made the revelations in an anxiously awaited, and sometimes incendiary, interview on CBS with Oprah Winfrey, which aired in the United States during prime time. In describing a real life that began as a fairy tale, but quickly became suffocating and cruel, Meghan’s forceful responses raised the fuel issues of race and privilege in the rarest echelon of British society.

Here are the main conclusions of the interview.

Hours after the interview was broadcast in the United States on Sunday, Britain was struggling with the shock wave that rippled across the Atlantic, exposing a deep, real rift.

For some, the interview was a moment of reflection on public people decidedly different from Prince Harry and Meghan, as they broke with the zealous silence expected from the royal family and brought a more American approach.

But for many black Britons, the interview offered a forceful assessment of the royal family and resurfaced barely submerged tensions about entrenched racism in the country at large.

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

The racism allegations made during the interview could have important implications for the monarchy, he said, where payments to family members and household expenses come in part from public funds.

“Once you realize that, and separate yourself from the idea of ​​personal family drama, what you have is a black woman who was the first, in the modern era at least, to enter that British institution,” said Ryder, “and does allegations of racism at the top. “

Meghan’s revelation that someone from the royal household questioned whether her son was “too dark to represent the UK” was a major problem, he said. (On Monday, Mrs. Winfrey said that Harry had asked her to clarify that neither Queen Elizabeth II nor Prince Philip was the source of the skin color comment.)

The Daily Mail, a British tabloid that lost a privacy case against Meghan last month, started on Monday morning with the headline in capital letters: “I wanted to kill myself”. Although he touted Meghan’s comments about his mental health, he called the race discussions “a sensational statement.”

Other major media outlets posted scathing comments, while some social media users denounced the couple’s infidelity to the family and others firmly defended them. The reaction illustrated divisions between those who see Harry and Meghan as victims and those who disapprove of their behavior and their willingness to publicly criticize the monarchy.

The palace said nothing after the interview. It remains to be seen whether the palace will investigate Harry and Meghan’s allegations with as much enthusiasm as it promised to investigate allegations that Meghan intimidated the royal team.

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

“I always said that the royal family would at best look outdated, out of touch, maybe hostile,” said Katie Nicholls, royalty editor at Vanity Fair, in an interview with Sky News shortly after the broadcast. “But this is much worse than that.”

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

The assessments did not arrive, but tonight many observers were reminded of Oprah Winfrey’s skill, empathy and total mastery of communication and focus as an interviewer. Even though it was all showbiz, even if it was all an act, to viewers it seemed engaging and moving.

Winfrey, of course, was one of the creators of the television interviews when she was not busy winning Tonys, Peabodys and receiving Oscar nominations. “The Oprah Winfrey Show” started in 1986 and ended, 25 seasons later, with more than 5,000 episodes in 2011. She said she interviewed 37,000 people.

It was in 1993 when Winfrey interviewed Michael Jackson at an event that stopped people on his way. (Prince Harry was not yet a teenager.) At the time, it was the most watched televised interview in history, with tens of millions of people tuning in. (The New York Times reported 62 million viewers; Winfrey claimed 90 million worldwide.)

In 2019, she revisited Jackson’s situation, interviewing the two guys from the documentary “Leaving Neverland”, who accused the singer of sexually abusing them when they were children.

Twitter journalists paid tribute to the techniques that Winfrey used in the interview, which was both intimate and charged, gentle but firm. The power of your attention is fascinating.

Behind the scenes, almost all interviews end in the same way, Winfrey said in a recent interview. The participant, no matter how rich or famous, asks, “How are you? How was that? How did I do? “

Following the interview, many British blacks felt a measure of revenge, after Meghan and Harry made it very clear that racist abuse played a role in their decision to leave the country, but also the frustration that some in Britain were still avoiding the subject.

For years, blacks have drawn attention to Meghan’s problematic portraits in the British press and the failure of much of the British establishment to recognize the issue.

Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, a lawyer and activist, has often spoken about racism directed at Meghan. In a heated shuttle on “Good Morning Britain”, she criticized Piers Morgan, the journalist and staunch critic of Meghan and Harry.

He called for a reaction to what he called the couple “shooting his family on global television” while Prince Philip, Harry’s grandfather, is hospitalized with heart disease.

“Do you want to deny that the royal family has any racist connotations or actions against the first biracial person, simply because you are in love with the queen?” Dr. Mos-Shogbamimu, who is black, responded, while Mr. Morgan accused her of “racial bait”.

“You can love the queen and be able to denounce the actions of the royal family when they get it wrong,” she added.

Nadine Batchelor-Hunt, a British political correspondent, said that Meghan’s treatment – from the British media and also in her claims of questions about her son’s potential skin color – personifies the ingrained racism experienced by blacks in Britain. Mrs. Batcheor-Hunt applauded Meghan’s “fearlessness” and said that, as a mixed-race woman, Meghan’s comments resonated deeply.

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

But allegations of racism from within the royal family, both from Meghan and Harry, have given royalty new relevance, she said.

“Watching her speak so openly about it is really liberating,” she said, “and that is why I think that many young people, especially many blacks, care so much.”

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

“This is a race-based story,” said Marcus Ryder, a visiting professor of media diversity at Birmingham City University. “And what we have is that we have a British media that has so far been slow to recognize that this is in fact a racial story.”

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

“Do we keep talking about diversity issues, and to what extent does diversity fit the hereditary principle?” he asked. “What she is saying is that there seems to be a conflict.”