Meghan Markle Responds to Sister Samantha Markle’s Defamation Lawsuit Against Her

Meghan Markle is trying to shut down her half-sister Samantha Markle’s new defamation lawsuit. According to a report by Us Weekly, the Duchess of Sussex just filed a new motion to dismiss Samantha’s lawsuit. This comes after her previous motion to dismiss was resolved by Samantha amending her defamation complaint.

Samantha is attempting to sue her younger half-sister, claiming that Meghan defamed her in her televised interview with Oprah Winfrey last year. She first filed her lawsuit in March of 2022, and Meghan filed her first motion to dismiss on June 17. She now claims that Samantha’s amendments to her complaint only make her case weaker, and refers to the whole thing as a “meritless defamation case.” She calls on the judge to dismiss it rather than humoring Samantha.

“We do not empanel juries to rule on whether two people are ‘close,’ or whether one genuinely feels that they ‘grew up as an only child,’” Meghan’s filing reads. “Courts are not equipped to adjudicate the legitimacy of a person’s feelings about their childhood and relationships. Nor should they be… This dispute has no place in this Court or any other.”

Markle is referring to her comments from her interview with Winfrey in March of 2021. When asked about Samantha, their father Thomas Markle and other estranged family members, she said: “I grew up as an only child, which everyone who grew up around me knows, and I wished I had siblings. I would have loved to have had siblings. [Samantha] changed her last name back to Markle in her early 50s… only when I started dating Harry. So, I think that says enough.”

Samantha, who wrote a book titled Diary of Princess Pushy’s Sister, claims that this is a mischaracterization that harms her and her father as public figures. Some of the evidence that she submitted to make that case included an email from Meghan to the Kensington Palace Communications Secretary, as well as a transcript of Meghan’s interview in the 2020 book Finding Freedom, a book about the royal family written by Omid Scobie and Caroyln Durand.

“Most obviously, her original complaint attached a 2018 email from Meghan to the then-communications secretary of Kensington Palace, Jason Knauf, that Plaintiff alleged was the basis for the allegedly defamatory statements in Finding Freedom,” Meghan’s motion reads. “However, the email on its face disproved Plaintiff’s claim that Meghan was somehow responsible for the authors’ allegedly defamatory statements in Finding Freedom.”

So far, a judge has not responded to Markle’s motion to dismiss this lawsuit. The Duchess of Sussex remains in the U.S. where she and Prince Harry now live.