This week, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were publicly chastised by a powerful friend, Oprah Winfrey.
Following their migration from the United Kingdom to the United States in 2020, the TV host became close friends with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
She famously interviewed the couple the next year during a devastating conversation about the British royal family, during which they made a number of explosive charges.
During an appearance on a podcast this week, Winfrey used the chance to poke fun at Harry and Meghan over the ‘Sussex’ appellation.
When speaking with Kelly Ripa for her Let’s Talk Off Camera podcast this week, the 71-year-old began by reminiscing a nice story about the couple.
Winfrey claimed Harry, 41, and Meghan, 43, contacted her around Easter and asked if she would assist them relocate a bunch of ducklings.
“I got a call from Harry, Prince Harry, on Easter Saturday,” she told listeners. “‘Sorry to bother you, O, but we have a duck problem here. Our pond is a stream, we don’t have a pond, so can we bring the ducks over to your pond?’”.
She went on to recall that she had another celebrity gal pal, Gayle King’s grandchildren visiting that day: “I said, ‘Wait until I can get the kids to come down to the pond so they can see you put the ducks in the pond’.
“And he goes, “No, we’re coming right away, we’re coming over!”
The anecdote prompted host Ripa to question Winfrey if she’d welcome it if someone gave her baby chicks one day, which is allegedly popular during the Easter season.
“I’d run them straight to the Sussexes,” Winfrey replied, laughing.
The producer then repeated the couple’s surname, slurring the’s’ and adding a couple extra ‘x’s’ to mock the moniker’s notoriously difficult pronunciation.
Winfrey continued to chuckle, demonstrating that her statements are not intended to do harm.
For those who need a reminder, former Suits actress Meghan said in March that she, her husband, and their two children – son Archie, six, and daughter Lilibet, four – have been covertly using the surname ‘Sussex’ for quite some time.
Speaking to PEOPLE Magazine earlier this month, she said that the late Queen Elizabeth II conferred the name on them on their wedding day, which was then passed down to their children.
“It’s our shared name as a family, and I guess I hadn’t recognised how meaningful that would be to me until we had children,” remarked the Duchess of Cornwall.
“I love that that is something that Archie, Lili, H and I all have together.”
The mother-of-two also emphasised her new family name in her Netflix lifestyle series As Ever, Meghan, in which she told off actress Mindy Kaling for incorrectly referring to her as ‘Markle’.
“It’s so funny you keep saying Meghan Markle, you know I’m Sussex now,” she told The Office US star. “You have kids and you go ‘No, I share my name with my children’.
Meghan added: “I didn’t know how meaningful it would be to me but it just means so much to go ‘This is OUR family name. Our little family name’.”
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