Dialy US Times: British royal family was facing a once-in-a-generation crisis on Monday after Duke and 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 primetime TV special, the couple painted a picture of a family so stubbornly rooted in its ways that it left a young and bi-racial couple alone to fend off racist abuse and their own troubled mental health, forcing both of them into silence and ultimately leaving them with no option but to flee the palace’s clutches.
Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, said she was so lonely and isolated while working as a royal that she contemplated suicide, telling Winfrey she “just didn’t want to be alive anymore.”
The couple — who despite their royal split still sit five relatives away from the throne — 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.
Prince Harry meanwhile admitted his relationships with his father 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 his wife in a negative light.
If there was even the faintest suggestion that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle could someday rejoin the royal family’s mission, Sunday’s interview likely extinguished it for good.
The interview with Oprah laid bare the depths of division between the couple and the rest of the family, a chasm that would have been unimaginable when they married in Windsor just three years ago.
Meghan told Winfrey that the family had been welcoming towards her at first, and that when they married, they were committed to their roles.
You may read: Interview with Oprah: Meghan ‘didn’t want to be alive anymore’
