Certain members of the British royal family may well have been avoiding the television on Sunday.

Following a week of unprecedented and hugely damaging revelations taken from Prince Harry’s memoir Spare — which accidentally went on sale early — a series of much-hyped interviews with the Duke of Sussex ahead of the book’s official launch on Tuesday began airing, with the prospect of more fuel being thrown onto his now very public rift with his family.

“I don’t know how staying silent is ever going to make things better,” Harry told Tom Bradby for Britain’s ITV — the first of the interviews to be shown — in a clip released before the broadcast. In another clip, he said that he saw “the red mist” in his brother Prince William, who in Spare he famously alleges physically attacked him after an argument over his relationship with Meghan Markle.

In the early moments of the interview, Harry said that his family had shown “absolutely no willingness to reconcile” and that he’d spent the last six years trying to get through to them, through conversations, letters and emails. “The saddest thing is that it never needed to be this way,” he said on this rift culminating with him deciding to open up about his grievances publicly.

Speaking to Anderson Cooper for CBS’ 60 Minutes: Prince Harry Interview — the first with the royal in the U.S. about Spare — Harry explained that he was now speaking publicly because “every single time I’ve tried to do it privately there have been briefings and leakings and planting of stories against me and my wife.” In a clip released before the hour-long TV special aired, Harry claimed that journalists had previously been “spoon-fed information” by Buckingham Palace, who would then refuse to put out a statement to protect him and Meghan Markle. “There become a point when silence is betrayal.”

A third interview — with Michael Strahan for Good Morning America — will be broadcast on Jan. 9.

The TV appearances come after several days of extremely personal claims and incidents of family discord were taken from early readings of Spare. Alongside describing how he lost his virginity (in field behind a pub to an “older lady” when he was 17, apparently), Harry also described various episodes of drug-taking (including reportedly trying magic mushrooms at a party held at the home of Courteney Cox). In a passage that sparked widespread criticism, Harry said that, as an Apache helicopter co-pilot in Afghanistan, he killed 25 Taliban soldiers, a claim that military veterans said could increase his personal security risk.

However, the most incendiary revelation, which led to front-page headlines across the U.K. and around the world, involved the alleged 2019 fight with William, who he claimed had called Markle “difficult”, “rude” and “abrasive,” resulting in a scuffle that saw Harry being “knocked to the floor,” where he landed “on top of the dog’s bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces of it cutting into me.”

The details from Spare come just weeks after Netflix’s Harry & Meghan doc-series, in which the prince first took aim at the royal family with accusations that William’s team had offered up stories about the Sussexes to the British press in order to distract from negative attention the then-Cambridges were receiving. 

So far there has been no comment from Buckingham Palace.