John Oliver’s appearance on a 2018 episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is going viral, thanks to some words of warning he had for Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, that seem eerily prescient in the wake of her and Prince Harry’s explosive interview with Oprah on Sunday.
Oliver’s warning came three months before Harry and Meghan got married.
“I would not blame her if she pulled out of this at the last minute,” he told host Stephen Colbert. “I don’t think you need to have just seen the pilot episode of The Crown to get a basic sense of she might be marrying into a family that could cause her some emotional complications.”
At first, Colbert pushed back against this kind of overarching criticism of the Royal Family. He asked Oliver, “But this generation seems like nice people, right, they’re all nice now, right?”
In response, Oliver doubled down on his criticism and got very specific (and even downright ugly).
“Yeah,” he replied. “They’re an emotionally stunted group of fundamentally flawed people doing a very silly pseudo-job. That’s what she’s marrying into. So, I hope she likes it, it’s going to be weird for her.”
At the time, Oliver’s words of warning seemed a bit overblown. The Royal Family came across as mostly sympathetic figures a few years ago, and them accepting Meghan into the family was seen as a sign of progress.
However, we got our first real glimpse that things were not going well with ongoing rumors of feuding between Meghan and Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, as well as Harry and his brother Prince William.
It was easy enough to dismiss those rumors as tabloid gossip, especially considering how tabloids such as The Times kept attacking Meghan. But everything came to a head in January 2020 when Meghan and Harry announced their unprecedented decision to step down as senior royals and start a new life for themselves in North America.
Now, Meghan and Harry’s interview with Oprah has confirmed that the Royal Family’s lack of support caused the Duchess of Sussex severe emotional distress and even suicidal thoughts.
“I just didn’t want to be alive anymore,” Meghan told Oprah.
Meghan revealed that she asked the Royal Family for help and even wanted to seek treatment for her depression at an in-patient facility. But she told Oprah they prevented her from doing so, claiming it “wouldn’t be good for the institution.”
Among the biggest revelations of the interview, Meghan detailed the emotional distress she suffered, saying that she was “silenced” by the Royal Family, that Kate Middleton made her cry (rather than the other way around), and that an unnamed member of the Royal Family was concerned about what the skin color of her son Archie would be. (Oprah later clarified that Prince Harry told her this person was not Queen Elizabeth or Prince Philip.)
These revelations cast the Royal Family and their behavior in an entirely different light. And the interview proved that Oliver might have been right in his barbed criticisms from 2018.