This is Why Meghan Markle is Being Sued by Her Half-Sister, as Trial Date is Set
Here is what she had to say in her latest court order.
To say that Meghan Markle doesn't get along with her half-sister, Samantha Markle, would be a major understatement. Ever since it was revealed that the Suits star was dating Prince Harry back in 2016, Meghan's estranged sibling hasn't shied away from openly discussing her, talking about everything from how she was as a child to her opinion on the couple's romance. She even wrote a book tearing the now-Duchess of Sussex apart.
During Meghan's bombshell Oprah Winfrey interview, Meghan addressed her relationship with her father's other daughter, likening herself to an only child. Samatha subsequently filed a defamation lawsuit against Meghan and this week, the judge issued a statement on the case, making a reasonable demand. Read on to learn what the judge asked the sisters to do and the details of the court papers.
Unless a settlement is made, judge Charlene Honeywell declared a trial date of October 2023, adding that she would like to expedite the proceeding. "The purpose of this order is to discourage wasteful pretrial activities, and to secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of this action," she wrote. She also issued deadlines for filing and estimated that the trial would last five days.
During Meghan's famous Oprah interview, she addressed Samantha Markle's book, The Diary of Princess Pushy's Sister, Part 1. "I think it'd be very hard to tell all when you don't know me. And I mean, it's this is a very different situation than my dad," she told Oprah. "When you talk about betrayal, betrayal comes from someone that you have a relationship with… I don't feel comfortable talking about people that I really don't know."
She added that she "grew up as an only child," revealing that she hadn't seen her in years. "I wished I had siblings. I would have loved to have had siblings. I mean, the last time I saw [Samantha] must have been at least 18, 19 years ago. And before that, ten years before that." She also added that Samantha didn't even take the surname Markle until Meghan started dating Harry. "She changed her last name back to Markle. And I think she was in her early 50s at that time, only when I started dating Harry," Meghan said. "So I think that says enough."
Samantha, 57, has slammed the interview, dubbing her sister's Oprah interview "false narrative and fairy-tale life story." She is suing her half sister for $75,000 in damages, for the claims made during the Oprah interview and also those in the Finding Freedom biography released the year before. She says that both have humiliated her at a public level.
However, Meghan's lawyer points out that the Duchess didn't even write the Finding Freedom biography, and that Meghan's Oprah interview was feeling-based. "Plaintiff [Samantha] first asserts that she can disprove that Meghan grew up as an only child. But this perception is inherently unfalsifiable. It is hard to imagine a more personal and subjective feeling than how one views their own childhood," her lawyers wrote in legal papers filed in Florida. "Moreover, Plaintiff's opposition completely ignores the context of the statement, where Ms Winfrey asked Meghan about her 'relationship' with Plaintiff (to whom Ms Winfrey referred as her 'half-sister on her father's side'). Meghan's response to that question that she 'grew up as an only child' was obviously not meant to be a statement of objective fact that she had no genetic siblings or half-siblings. Rather, it was a textbook example of a subjective statement about how a person feels about her childhood." Meghan's lawyer, Michael Kump, of the Kinsella Weitzman Iser Kump Holley law firm, also lashed out at Samanta personally: "This baseless and absurd lawsuit is just a continuation of a pattern of disturbing behavior. We will give it the minimum attention necessary, which is all it deserves."
