Oprah Winfrey has defended one of the most memorable questions from her bombshell tell-all interview with Prince Harry and Meghan. The highly-anticipated interview saw the Duke and Duchess of Sussex send shockwaves around the world and make several eye-raising allegations about the Royal Family, and how they were treated during their time as senior working royals. One of the most controversial talking points came when they claimed a senior royal raised concerns about the colour of their unborn son Archie's skin.
While in one exchange with Winfrey, Meghan alleged she hadn’t been able to speak up on issues important to her and felt she wasn’t using her voice. It prompted the chat show host to ask the now-infamous question: “Were you silent or were you silenced?” And in a new video interview with Vanity Fair, where Winfrey reflects on some of the biggest moments of her career, she watched back on that moment where she asked the question and the hand gesture she performed that went with it.
Oprah explains the question
And she said: “Ok, very nice, I don’t think I’ve done it since. I don’t know where the hell that came from. “I wanted to be clear because was she silenced, were people telling her not to talk? That’s why I said that. I said it for clarification because I didn’t want later to hear ‘well no it wasn’t that it really was that I was silenced they wouldn’t let me talk. So it was all for clarification’.”
The bombshell interview aired in the US and UK more than five years ago in March 2021, while Meghan was pregnant with Prince Archie and just weeks before the death of the late Prince Philip. At the time, it forced Buckingham Palace courtiers into crisis talks as they grappled with how to deal with the allegations made against the Firm. After two days of crisis talks, a statement was issued on behalf of the late Queen that memorably said: “While some recollections may vary, they are taken seriously and will be addressed by the family privately. Harry, Meghan and Archie will always be much-loved family members.”
Reflections on the interview setup
And reflecting further on the interview and how it was set up, Winfrey added: “This had been postponed probably three times because this was 2021 and I was still in my crazy ‘I can’t leave the house period’ so I didn’t leave the house for 322 days. “By the time we finally sat down, I think they were both ready. They didn’t know anything I was going to ask them, but I had said to them ahead of time ‘I’m going to try to cover everything’. “This interview took three and a half hours. And is always the case for me, I want it to be a ‘win-win for you’. So I was just trying to carefully go through everything that had come up in the past.”
Harry and Meghan’s Oprah interview marked the first of several times the Sussexes rallied against their royal relatives. Just over a year later, the couple appeared in their Netflix docuseries, where they accused the Firm of lying to protect certain Royal Family members but not them. Months later, Harry also released his memoir Spare, where he accused his brother Prince William of pushing him into a dog bowl in an argument and was highly critical of his stepmother, Queen Camilla.
Recent reconciliation efforts
However, in recent months, Harry has sought to reconcile with his family, including his father, the King, and said in an interview last year that he would love reconciliation with his family. Earlier this month, Harry brought Meghan and their children to the UK to see the King for the first time in four years. Charles welcomed the Sussexes to his Highgrove residence after days of speculation over whether the family meeting would take place on Harry’s trip to the UK for a series of public appearances. Archie, seven, and Lilibet, five, had previously seen their grandfather in person during Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations in 2022. The meeting between Charles and the young prince and princess is likely to be interpreted as a sign of the thawing of the relationship between the King and his son Harry.
