In his latest blockbuster interview with Oprah Winfrey, Prince Harry explains that opening up to the world about the royal family being dysfunctional, racist and indifferent to the suffering of him and his wife, Meghan Markle, is an act of compassion, not anger.

“I’ve never had any anger through this. I’ve always had compassion,” Harry said in his discussion with Oprah Winfrey for “The Me You Can’t See,” their new joint Apple TV+ documentary series on mental health.

The Duke of Sussex explained to Winfrey that he believed his and Meghan’s globally televised interview with her on March 7 was “compassionate.” He also said he hoped it would therefore lead to a reconciliation with his family. After he and Meghan rejected royal life in 2020 and moved to her home state of California, they became estranged from his family.

“The interview was about being real, being authentic, and hopefully sharing an experience that we know is incredibly relatable to a lot of people around the world, despite our unique, privileged position,” Harry told Winfrey for the series, which debuted Thursday night.

Harry also said of the March 7 interview, which aired as a much-hyped CBS TV special: “I like to think that we were able to speak truth in the most compassionate way possible, therefore leaving an opening for reconciliation and healing.”

It looks like there has been anything but reconciliation and healing since March 7. Harry’s older brother, Prince William, reacted angrily to Harry and Meghan’s claims that a royal family member said racist things about her and their son, Archie. At a public event, William declared: “We’re very much not a racist family.”

Harry also reportedly received a cold reception from William, their father, Prince Charles, and other family members when he traveled to the U.K. in April for Prince Philip’s funeral. With regard to Charles, Harry also has come under fire for claiming that his father lacked understanding, cut him off financially and inherited an unhealthy approach to parenting from his parents, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip.

Given another of Harry’s new revelations to Winfrey, he probably should have known that the royal family didn’t look favorably on him doing tell-all interviews. Harry told Winfrey that he believed the monarchy conspired with the U.K. media to launch a smear campaign against Meghan in the days before the March 7 interview.

“Before the interview had aired, because of their headlines and the combined effort of the firm and the media to smear her, I was woken up in the middle of the night to her crying into her pillow because she doesn’t want to wake me up because I’m already carrying too much,” Harry said.

“That is heartbreaking,” Harry said. “I held her. We talked. She cried, and she cried, and she cried.”

In alleging that the palace and the media conspired to discredit Meghan, Harry appears to be specifically referring to a March 2 report in the Sunday Times that said Meghan had been accused of bullying and harassing staff when she was a working royal, the Daily Beast reported.

The report quoted details of an email sent by Jason Knauf, Meghan and Harry’s former PR representative, to William’s private secretary. Knauf wrote: “I am very concerned that the Duchess was able to bully two PAs out of the household in the past year. The treatment of (an unnamed staff member) was totally unacceptable.”

Following the Times report, Buckingham Palace said it was investigating the claim.

In Harry’s view, being open about his difficult relationships with his family members is his way of promoting mental health and normalizing people’s need to speak up about their struggles. During the new show, he talked to Winfrey about the trauma and grief he experienced after the sudden death of his mother, Princess Diana, in 1997.

Harry said the royal family didn’t discuss Diana’s death, leading him to suppress his emotions and later numb his pain by drinking too much. He also expressed frustration that his father never intervened to help him when he was suffering as a child, or when he and Meghan were subject to intense media scrutiny after they married in 2018.

“My father used to say to me when I was younger, he used to say to both William and I, ‘Well, it was like that for me so it’s going to be like that for you,'” Harry said.

Harry said it wasn’t until he met Meghan, a former TV actress, that he began therapy to address his pain.

A major reason Harry said that he and Meghan decided to step away from royal duties was because they chose to put their mental health first.

Being part of “The Firm,” Harry said, left him “feeling trapped and feeling controlled through fear, both by the media and by the system itself, which never encouraged the talking about this kind of trauma. … Now, I will never be bullied into silence.”

Harry admitted that making the move to California was “really scary” because “at every possible opportunity, the forces working against us tried to make it impossible.”

Harry also said: “I have no regrets. It is incredibly sad, but I have no regrets at all because now I am in a place where I feel I should have been four years ago.”