In Oprah interview British royal family plunged into crisis after Harry and Meghan allege racism and neglect

 

British royal family plunged into crisis after Harry and Meghan allege racism and neglect in Oprah interview

By Rob Picheta, CNN

Updated 0416 GMT (1216 HKT) March 9, 2021

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Duchess of Sussex discusses miscarriage in opinion piece

Prince Harry says he grew up unaware of unconscious bias

Meghan Markle explains why she is not on social media

Harry and Meghan suing over pictures of Archie

Prince Harry and Meghan: UK must confront colonial past

Duchess of Sussex reflects on lingering racial injustices in US

Meghan: I didn't want to be alive anymore

CBS releases new clips from Harry and Meghan interview

Don Lemon responds to Oprah's interview with Meghan and Harry

'It's devastating for the royal family': Quest reacts to the Oprah interview

Diana's chief of staff on Harry & Meghan's royal rift

Meghan and Harry announce they're expecting second child

See Prince Harry and James Corden tour LA on open-air bus

Duchess of Sussex says Buckingham Palace is 'perpetuating falsehoods'

Inside Harry and Meghan's life after royalty

Duchess of Sussex discusses miscarriage in opinion piece

Prince Harry says he grew up unaware of unconscious bias

Meghan Markle explains why she is not on social media

Harry and Meghan suing over pictures of Archie

Prince Harry and Meghan: UK must confront colonial past

Duchess of Sussex reflects on lingering racial injustices in US

Meghan: I didn't want to be alive anymore

CBS releases new clips from Harry and Meghan interview

Don Lemon responds to Oprah's interview with Meghan and Harry

'It's devastating for the royal family': Quest reacts to the Oprah interview

Diana's chief of staff on Harry & Meghan's royal rift

Meghan and Harry announce they're expecting second child

See Prince Harry and James Corden tour LA on open-air bus

Duchess of Sussex says Buckingham Palace is 'perpetuating falsehoods'

London (CNN)Britain's royal family was facing a once-in-a-generation crisis on Monday after Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, rocked the institution with a litany of devastating allegations in their eagerly awaited interview with Oprah Winfrey.

Over the course of the two-hour special, the couple -- who despite their royal split still sit five relatives away from the throne -- painted a picture of a family so stubbornly rooted in its ways that it left a young, bi-racial couple alone to fend off racist abuse and their own troubled mental health, forcing them into silence and ultimately leaving them with no option but to flee the palace's clutches.

Meghan said she was so isolated and lonely while working as a royal that she contemplated suicide, telling Winfrey she "just didn't want to be alive anymore." The couple were intensely critical of the way the institution treated them, and Meghan revealed a staggering allegation of racism from a member of the clan that threatens to throw its reputation into crisis.

Harry meanwhile admitted his relationships with his father and heir to the throne, Prince Charles, and his brother, Prince William, have come under severe strain in recent years, and suggested the institution may have planted stories in the media that cast him and Meghan in a negative light.

'I just didn't want to be alive anymore'

The palace faced storms on multiple fronts by sunrise in London on Monday.

The interview had been relentlessly previewed in the media over recent days, drawing comparisons with a royal tell-all given by Harry's mother, Princess Diana, in 1995, which shed light on the breakdown of her marriage to Charles.

But the revelations in Sunday's broadcast may have dwarfed even those in magnitude, as Harry and Meghan's scorched-earth confessional posed problem after problem for palace staffers and senior royals.