Oprah Winfrey on Monday shared new clips that did not make it into the final edited version of her interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, revealing more details and about the couple’s high-profile split from the Royal Family.
The revelations included more information about the Royal Family member who asked about the skin colour of the couple’s first child, Archie, before he was born. The couple said in the broadcast portion of the interview that there had been “several” conversations about how dark his skin would be.
Harry and Markle did not tell Winfrey who asked the questions, but Winfrey revealed to CBS This Morning on Monday that Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, were not part of that conversation.
“(Harry) wanted to make sure that I knew, and if I had an opportunity to share it, that it was not his grandmother nor his grandfather,” Winfrey said on CBS This Morning.
Winfrey says she spoke to the couple for more than three hours, but their chat was edited down to about 85 minutes for the broadcast.
The couple told Winfrey that they left the Royal Family because of the toxic British media coverage, and because they felt trapped in that environment. Markle also spoke about her own mental health struggles under that spotlight, addressed her past with sister-in-law Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, and revealed that her unborn child will be a girl.
Additional footage released on Monday shows Harry talking about his father and brother, Markle talking about her father and step-sister and the two of them discussing the apparent lack of protection they received from the Royal Family against the media.
In one unaired clip, Winfrey asked Harry if anyone within the Royal Family had apologized to him for the circumstances that drove him to leave the U.K.
“No, sadly not,” Harry said. “The feeling is that this was our decision and therefore the consequences are on us.”
He added that he’s “very aware” that he was able to escape from that environment whereas his brother, Prince William, is not.
“My brother can’t leave that system, but I have,” he said. “It’s a toxic environment but I will always be there for him.”
Harry also told Winfrey that his father, Prince Charles, has “had to make peace” with that same environment.
In the same clip, Markle shot down any suggestion that she has faced the same scrutiny and “rude” coverage as others, and directly compared her treatment in the British media to that of Middleton.
“Kate was called ‘Waity Katie,’ waiting to marry William,” she said. “While I imagine that was really hard … this is not the same.
“If a member of this family will comfortably say, ‘We’ve all had to deal with things that are rude’ — rude and racist are not the same.”
Prince Harry said it “would make a huge difference” if his family acknowledged that they were treated differently because of racism.
“There’s a lot of people that have seen it for what it was,” he said. “It’s talked about around the world, yet the very people that don’t want to see it or can’t see it choose not to see it.”
In another unaired clip, Markle spoke about the pain her father caused her when he decided to speak to the British tabloids ahead of her wedding, after the paparazzi mounted a major search to find him and get him on the record.
“The whole thing brings us to where we are today,” she said. She says she spoke to him about his upcoming story before it was published, and he still denied that he had spoken to the media about her.
“‘I just need you to tell me, and if you tell me the truth, we can help,’” she recalls telling him at the time. “And he wasn’t able to do that.”
She added that the paparazzi were just as dogged in trying to find her mother, but her mother did not speak to them.
Markle also denounced her step-sister Samantha Markle’s upcoming tell-all book about their relationship. She said she last saw Samantha 18 or 19 years ago, and that they hadn’t seen each other for 10 years before that meeting happened.
“It’d be very hard to tell all when you don’t know me,” she said. “She changed her last name back to Markle … only when I started dating Harry. So I think that says enough.”
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