"Princess Pushy": Meghan Markle Blames "Drama Stirred Up" on Warring Family

Early on in Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's courtship, it became clear that it wasn't only Harry's family who had a problem with the Suits star. Shortly after Meghan skyrocketed to international fame as the girlfriend of one of the world's most eligible bachelors, someone close to her began offering commentary about her – her half-sister, Samantha Markle.

However, Samantha, who is over a decade-and-a-half older than Meghan, didn't exactly have nice things to say about the California native and offered up a nickname that seemed to stick in the press for years to come – Princess Pushy. In her new Netflix series, Harry & Meghan, the 41-year-old opens up about her relationship with her sister and how it impacted her reputation with the media.

According to Meghan, she was never close to Samantha, Thomas Markle's daughter from his first marriage. In fact, when she hooked up with Harry, it had been over ten years since she had been in the same room as her. 

"The UK media, I truly believe, wanted my mum's side of my family to be the ones that all this drama could be stirred up with, and they just had my mum, who is classy and quiet, and then you have the other side of my family that is just acting differently," she says in the third episode of the show. 

"My half-sister, who I hadn't seen for over a decade, and that was only for a day and a half, suddenly it felt like she was everywhere. I don't know your middle name, I don't know your birthday. You are telling these people that you raised me and you are calling me Princess Pushy?"

She pointed out that she never had a "fall out" with her sister – but that was only because they weren't remotely close enough. "We didn't have a closeness to be able to have [one] ― and I wanted a sister."

Later in the episode, Meghan invites a surprise guest onto the show, Samantha's daughter, Ashleigh. She goes on to tell Meghan that she and her brother were not raised by their mother but by their paternal grandparents, who later "adopted them" because her mother wasn't around. "My biological mother, I've not seen her since I was six years old. And then later in life, around 2007," she said. 

In a confessional, Ashleigh explains that when she "reconnected" with her mom, she also got to know Meghan through Thomas. "It started out with these long emails back and forth to each other and then texts and calls," she said. "After awhile, I think we were talking on some level several days a week."

She added that Meghan became a "maternal" figure, a "sister," and a "best friend," and the Duchess agreed. "We both craved the same thing," Meghan said about "hit[ting] it off" with her niece. "I wanted a sister, and she was like a little sister."

RELATED: The Biggest Royal Romance Scandals of All Time

Ashleigh also explains that Samantha felt "resentment" toward Meghan as her relationship with Prince Harry intensified, which "seemed to get angrier and bigger" as the relationship progressed. "We stopped talking. You know, some people you just can't reason with."