Shocking claims Meghan Markle made during Oprah interview

In their first primetime chat following their marriage in 2017, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle sat down with Oprah Winfrey. Many royal viewers anticipated it to be dramatic after seeing the previews, but no one could have guessed what Harry and Meghan would say about their tenure as senior royals before formally standing down in January 2020. Here are a few of the most shocking discoveries.

The royal family had ‘concerns' about Archie's skin colour

Meghan revealed that the royal family was concerned about her baby's skin color, and Harry slammed his relatives for failing to criticize imperialist overtones in the newspapers.

Meghan informed Winfrey that when she was pregnant, an unidentified family member posed the question of how dark their unborn baby Archie's skin would be.

One of the more shocking discoveries from the interview was that there were many “concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he was born.”

“That was relayed to me from Harry. Those were conversations that family had with him Those were his family's talks with him,” Meghan continued, refusing to say who was included in the discussions. “That would be very damaging to them,” she said.

“That conversation, I am never going to share,” Harry said. “At the time, it was awkward, I was a bit shocked.”

“I'm not comfortable with sharing that,” he said when Winfrey asked if he should share the questions raised during the interview. Harry had claimed the royal in dispute was not the Queen or Prince Philip, Winfrey told CBS on Monday.

“But it was right at the beginning,” he said. “What will the kids look like? That was at the beginning when she wasn't going to get security, when my family suggested that she might continue acting (because there wasn't going to be money for her). It was back when she didn't have much security and my family said she keep acting (because there wouldn't be any money for her).”

When legislators called out “colonial undertones” in the way Meghan was covered in the British news, Harry chastised the royals for declining to defend them.

Mental health crisis

During her years as a professional royal, the Duchess of Sussex claims to have had suicidal thoughts. “I just didn't want to be alive any more. And that was a very clear and real and frightening constant thought. And I remember how he [Harry] just cradled me .” She said she requested assistance from the palace but was turned down. “They said, my heart goes out to you because I see how bad it is, but there's nothing we can do to protect you because you're not a paid employee of the institution.

Meghan was ‘silenced'

“Everyone in my world was given a very clear directive from the moment the world knew Harry and I were dating, to always say ‘no comment'.”

Meghan said that she assumed the royal institution was protecting her.

“It was only once we were married and everything started to really worsen that I came to understand that not only was I not being protected but … they weren't willing to tell the truth to protect me and my husband.”

She agreed with Oprah's assessment that she had been “silenced” rather than “silent” when she began dating Harry.

“There's the family, and then there's the people that are running the institution, those are two separate things and it's important to be able to compartmentalise that because the queen, for example, has always been wonderful to me,” she said when asked whether she was not embraced by the powers that be.