Help! My family is royally messed up!

[green_grrl]

Prince Harry shared a lot of family dysfunction in his memoir. The Washington Post podcast did a interview with Carolyn Hax where they posed some fictional letters for help from royal family members for her to give advice on. As per usual with Carolyn, good answers. I thought comm readers might be interested. 26 minutes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/help-my-family-is-royally-messed-up/

Comments

[minoanmiss]

*hands out bags of popcorn*

[castiron]

"Kardashians with crowns", heh!

[green_grrl]

I mean, sounds about right!

[the_future_modernes]

The way they framed the first and second questions made me very uncomfortable.

The first thing that leaked from his book was that william physically and verbally abused him. The second thing he has been drumbeating about is that his family fed lies about him and later him and his wife as well as their private business to the tabloids. To the point where they published private correspondence of his wife. Thirdly, he mentioned telling them over and over what the issues were and them either ignoring him or yelling at him for daring. His wife nearly committed suicide. She had a miscarriage.

In light of this... why is the first question from the abuser's pov complaining that Harry spilled too many family secrets? And why was Harry's side of the question vaguely talking about family dynamics and mentioning racism instead of expressing concretely what the problems were? These are literal abuse allegations, and this program joins the British Press and a surprising amount of American media in playing down the seriousness of whats going on here.

The second question continues the theme by pretending that William didn't literally have a huge fucking problem with Meghan, and with the leaking that he did, hurt her too. Remember, Harry said that Royal sources were literally his dad and his step mom and his brother leaking and lying about him and his wife. Its not oh my husband and his brother are having a fuss. Its "so my husband's brother and his family are trying to abuse us through the press and break up our marriage." That's a fundamentally different situation, which requires much different advice.

I couldn't really get through the rest of it, because Carolyn Hax can't give good advice if she doesn't know the full story. And whoever the host is has apparently swallowed the British media narrative lock stock and barrel. What I will remember though, is that kids with middle class and rich abusive parents, or parents that are charismatic and otherwise have some hierarchy in a community, have hell to get anyone to believe them when they talk about the abuse. After all, people who have power and possessions are for some reason considered to automatically have morals too. And of course, if the abused kid gets fucked up by the abuse and does some weird or shitty things, then they ain't a perfect victim either, and as we all know, if you ain't a perfect victim, sucks to be you!

[green_grrl]

Yeah, the first question, especially, I was like, “So you run the family in the public eye constantly and have weaponized the media—and now you’re complaining that someone is using the media against you?”

The third question was actually the best one, addressing Charles marrying Camilla, and Carolyn saying, “You effed that situation up.”