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TV therapy at prime time: Prince Harry, Duchess Meghan and interviewer Oprah Winfrey
Photo: HARPO PRODUCTIONS / Joe Pugliese / REUTERS
The most shocking moment comes halfway through the interview, after an hour.
After countless revelations that are explosive in their own right - about her secret wedding three days
before
the wedding at Windsor Castle, about the loneliness of the newcomers in the palace, about racism in the monarchy.
Above all, however, the question still hangs: Why did they
really
leave
the royal family
?
What is the truth behind the Megxit, the most recent scandal at the British court?
"I just didn't want to live anymore," says Duchess Meghan finally.
"It was a clear and real and terrifyingly permanent thought." Her life had been made so unbearable that she needed psychiatric help.
But the palace refused her, even though she desperately asked for support.
“I was told I couldn't do this.
That this is not good for the institution. ”In other words: not good for the crown.
Feelings of suicide, but left alone by the "company", as she calls it: Even Oprah Winfrey is stunned, and she has heard a lot as the interviewer of the stars.
"Woah!"
It was always clear that this would be the most spectacular public appearance by Royals in a long time: Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan for the first time in a double interview since they left the family business, more or less voluntarily - moderated by Oprah Winfrey, the woman who can pull secrets out of people's noses like no one else.
But hardly anyone expected that it would reveal such abysses, including Meghan's suicidal thoughts, which were revealed for the first time.
Only the royals knew that, of course - which should explain the media campaign of the past few days against the breakaway couple.
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Tragedy behind smiles: The royal family on the balcony of Buckingham Palace 2016
Photo: Tim Ireland / AP
Buckingham Palace must have guessed what was happening here.
Not just a historical PR disaster.
But a new, this time possibly even existential crisis for the monarchy, the meaning and purpose of which is becoming less and less apparent these days.
A crisis that has already overshadowed many previous scandals - and once again makes the tragedy of Harry's mother, Princess Diana, very present.
Tragic, Gossip, Royals, a lucrative mix.
For three years - long before the British breakup - Winfrey, America's most successful TV entertainer, has been trying to do this interview.
The US network CBS is said to have paid its production company Harpo up to nine million dollars for the rights.
Meghan and Harry, Winfrey assures, would not get any money for it.
What they get in return: absolution.
The conversation begins quite harmlessly: The camera meets Harry and Meghan, on their new $ 15 million estate in Montecito, California.
A garden, birds chirping, even a chicken coop.
Then Winfrey, who lives in the neighborhood, initially sits down with Meghan on the idyllic terrace of "a friend" and promises - or better said, threatens: "No topic is taboo."
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Absolution in the garden: Harry, Meghan and Oprah Winfrey
Photo: Rick Rycroft / dpa
The Duchess of Sussex, heavily pregnant, tells how "naive" she was when she married into the royal family.
"I didn't quite understand what the job was." The truth, she reports, is much more brutal than the "fairy tale" many people use it to imagine.
The argument is of course difficult to understand: Princess Diana had perished two decades earlier from similar pressure.
Can Meghan really have been surprised?
Her first "shocking" experience, says Meghan, was reports of her alleged feud with Duchess Kate, the wife of Harry's brother, Prince William.
The British "Yellow Press" had long since distorted settled tensions on the wedding day at their expense.
"They needed a narrative about a heroine and a villain." The royal family did nothing to eradicate the rumors.
Her passport, driver's license and keys were confiscated when they entered the royal family, reports Meghan.
She was not allowed to leave her home at Kensington Palace and could no longer meet her friends.
They were "silenced".
And when she became pregnant for the first time, with Prince Archie, who is now almost two, she was made unmistakably clear that her child would not get royal personal protection.
Meghan describes how she got deeper and deeper into depression.
"I just saw no way out." It dawned on her what her "permanent reality would look like".
She starts to cry when she recounts how she had to smile for the cameras at an event the same day she let Harry know about her suicidal thoughts.
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Secretly married before: Official wedding of Harry and Meghan
Photo: Dominic Lipinski / dpa
Winfrey persistently approaches the core of the interview: What is the motive behind the exclusion, the hostility, the "character assassination" of Meghan, whose mother is African American?
Maybe that has something to do with the color of her skin?
Winfrey suspects the answer, of course, but she wants to hear from Meghan.
Yes, she says: During her pregnancy with Archie, Harry was approached several times by the family about it.
How dark would the baby's skin be?
“What?” Calls out Winfrey, herself an African American.
Who said that?
Meghan squirms: Revealing that would "hurt the royals a lot".
Prince Harry confirms this when he joins it in the second hour of the interview: These conversations had taken place "right at the beginning".
But he also refuses to give names.
Only that: "What will the children look like?" They asked themselves.
Brutal treatment: Queen Elizabeth II and the royal "company"
Photo: ADRIAN DENNIS / AFP
Harry also said that his family was absolutely silent about the "colonial undertones" of British tabloid reporting on Meghan.
He was particularly outraged: "It wasn't just about her, but about what she represents."
“My biggest worry was that history would repeat itself,” he says, referring to his mother's death.
Her current situation - »plus racism, plus social media« - was even »far more dangerous« than that of Princess Diana: »It won't end well,« he feared.
All of this shaped her decision to break away from the royal family.
That was by no means a shock to the Queen, as the British press put it, but the result of two years of negotiations, at the end of which Harry's father, Prince Charles, temporarily refused to take his son's calls.
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But a "happy ending"?
Meghan and Harry (2018 in Australia)
Photo: SAEED KHAN / AFP
There are allegations that put the palace in an extremely bad light - and they come at a time when the Queen is almost 95, Prince Charles as heir to the throne is already 72 and after a long phase in which the monarchy is unifying because of its younger generation could register a steady increase in sympathy.
This heyday is now finally a thing of the past.
Other revelations of this evening, however, almost fade:
The pompous wedding at Windsor Castle was just a show: they had secretly married three days earlier, according to Meghan and Harry, "in our garden, with the Archbishop of Canterbury."
After their break, the royal family not only cut personal protection, but also any financial support: "We live from my mother's inheritance," says Harry.
Her streaming deal with Netflix (allegedly worth $ 100 million) is to pay for the ongoing security measures.
In the USA, the African-American producer and director Tyler Perry initially made his mansion in Los Angeles available to them, as well as personal security.
Your second baby is a girl.
So in the end a "happy ending" after all?
The prince saved her life, says Meghan.
"She saved us all," says the prince.
Icon: The mirror