Arthur Greene
In a YouTube video titled “We Proved Royal Experts Lie About Harry and Meghan,” four leading royal commentators review the Sussexes’ hotly anticipated interview with Oprah… without having seen it.
Famous YouTube pranksters, Josh Pieters and Archie Manners, duped the royal experts into giving interviews to a fake news company two days before Oprah’s interview was aired.
In the video, they show the royal commentators – Richard Fitzwilliams, Dickie Arbiter, Victoria Arbiter, and Ingrid Seward – giving their thoughts on the interview under the guise that they will be televised immediately after the interview.
Pieters asks at the beginning of the video, “Had these professional royal experts, who influenced the public, already made up their minds about Harry and Meghan’s interview before seeing it? This is what happened.”
Ingrid Stewart, commentator and editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine, said of the Duchess of Sussex, “to my mind this was an actress giving one of her great performances – from start to finish, Meghan was acting.”
Royal commentator Richard Fitzwilliams said it was “not a balanced interview,” saying that “Oprah is a friend [of Harry and Meghan’s] and gave them an easy ride.”
In turn, the royal experts each exposed their own biases against Harry and especially against Meghan. They had already made up their minds to criticise the couple.
Stewart at one point says “to hear [Meghan] talking about members of the royal family didn’t surprise me at all. I think she was very unwise to do it, but she’s the kind of woman that wants to have her say.”
The pranksters go on to bait the experts by asking them to comment on Meghan’s made up anti-vaccine stance, to which Dickie Arbiter responds “I think it’s very selfish.”
Dickie Arbiter has called the YouTube video a “scam” that was edited to be “deliberately misleading.”
Meanwhile, Stewart and Victoria Arbiter have not publicly addressed the prank.
Fitzwilliams, however, said he “obviously didn’t know it was a sting” and that the comments had been “used out of context”.
The commentator’s explanation has been roundly rejected on Twitter, however, with one user telling him, “You’ve been Royally exposed.”
Picture source: YouTube
Video source: YouTube
