The surprising (and sad) similarities between Lady Di and Meghan Markle's interviews
We analyze the coincidences between the two interviews separated by 26 years apart in which things do not seem to have changed much.
There are 26 years of difference between the time when the Duchess of Sussex and Princess Diana were interviewed by different journalists to reveal their respective "bombings." Meghan did it from Montecito. Princess Diana in the living room of her London dwelling. Meghan had her husband, Prince Harry, by her side. Diana was completely alone (in fact, Carlos had just recently admitted to the whole world that he had had an affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles). Meghan had been besieged by negative attention from the press and racist trolls on social media. Princess Diana had seen some of her private conversations posted on the phone and she was described as "unstable" by the press. The timing, the places, and the details were different. But as the waters calm after Meghan's interview, the common elements become clear: the two had to cope with their mental health issues, the backlash from the press and their fairy tales were cut short. .
A brief summary for those unfamiliar: In November 1995, Princess Diana participated in an interview with BBC journalist Martin Bashir. Buckingham Palace did not authorize it. All the topics were touched upon, including Diana's bulimia, her depression, and her failed marriage to Prince Charles. ("There were three of us in this marriage, so you could say we were a crowd," he said, referring to her relationship with Camilla Parker-Bowles). Almost 40% of the UK population saw the interview — and the public image of the monarchy was significantly damaged as a result.
Two and a half decades later, her son and her wife had their own in-depth interview on Oprah with Meghan and Harry, after resigning from the royal family.
The language used by the two women is eerily similar: "You think you know what's next," Princess Diana told Bashir in 1995. "I didn't fully understand what my work was about," the Duchess of Sussex told Oprah Winfrey in 2021. “It seemed like she was day after day on the front pages of newspapers,” Diana said. "I'm everywhere," Meghan repeated years later. Diana felt boycotted by the “people around her”. For her part, Meghan referred to an intangible “institution”. “I didn't like myself. I was embarrassed that I couldn't deal with the pressure, ”revealed Diana. "I was very embarrassed to verbalize it back then," Meghan said. "But ... the truth is that I no longer wanted to stay alive."
The two women admitted to self-harm: Meghan had suicidal ideations ("I couldn't find a solution," she said). Diana, for her part, suffered from postpartum depression and cut herself ("You feel misunderstood and very, very low in spirits"). They both felt sadly unsupported: “I was the first person in this family who had ever had depression or had openly cried. And obviously that was demoralizing, because how can you support something you've never seen before? ”Diana said. "When nobody listens to you, or you feel like nobody listens to you, all kinds of things start to happen." Meghan asked for treatment, but she was told that this option was not feasible.
Both Diana and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex implied that their respective tours of Australia provoked the jealousy of the monarchy. "Everything changed after the Australian tour," Harry told Oprah. “It was the first time the family got to see how amazing she was doing her job. And that brought back memories. They saw how natural it was for him to have reached the family and to be able to connect with people ”.
The memories she refers to are those of her mother. Diana's popularity was an explosion across the continent. To such an extent that she said that Carlos was jealous: “While on tour in Australia, for example, she was heard everywhere 'oh, she's on the other side'. Well, if you are a man like my husband, a proud man, you don't like to hear that every day for four weeks. And you feel discouraged, instead of feeling happy and sharing it, ”she said. "With the media attention came a lot of jealousy, and a lot of complicated situations arose precisely from that."
It should come as a surprise that the Duchess of Sussex and the Princess of Wales had such similar experiences. The two women who entered the British Royal House did so from very different backgrounds and at very different moments in their lives. The former married a member of the British royal house in the latter half of her thirties, with a successful career behind her. The second got engaged when she was just 19 years old. The first is a mixed race divorced American and the second a blue-blooded British woman whose virginity was known to all. Furthermore, both the monarchy and society are supposedly better now; we are more understanding, more progressive, more tolerant.
But as the saying goes: the more things change, the more they stay the same. And now two successive generations of spectators have had to assume and understand how much damage an institution can cause to the same people who make it up.
