Meghan Markle won the bid to have her half-sister’s defamation lawsuit dismissed by a judge. Photo / Getty Images
Meghan Markle won the bid to have her half-sister’s defamation lawsuit dismissed by a judge. Photo / Getty Images
Meghan Markle’s half-brother has blasted her for telling “another lie” for declaring she felt like she grew up an only child.
The Duchess of Sussex, 41, sparked outrage from Thomas Markle Jr and her half-sister Samantha when she told Oprah Winfrey during her 2021 tell-all interview with thechat show host she felt like she had grown up without siblings – and her lawyers later insisted the remark was the expression of a “subjective feeling” rather than a comment on whether she had genetic brothers and sisters.
But Thomas, 56, told 7NEWS Spotlight in a joint interview with Samantha and Thomas Markle, the father they share with Meghan, about seeing the Oprah chat: “I just made it a little mark on my board and said, ‘Oh, there’s another lie’.”
Samantha, 58, added about the interview: “[I wasn’t] any more puzzled than I was when she said, ‘I lost my father.’
“We knew that she didn’t lose our dad, she iced our father and there’s a very big difference, it was deliberate.”
When the family was asked in the interview why Meghan would publicly distance herself from them, they said it is because she believes they aren’t “good enough” for the royal family.
Samantha Markle has claimed her sister made 'false and malicious statements' during her explosive Oprah interview. Photo / Channel 7
Samantha added: “What she told the royal family, what she told Harry wouldn’t have jived, wouldn’t have been consistent with the truth.”
The only member of her family that Meghan maintains contact with is her mother, Doria Ragland, 66.
Meghan has been estranged from her dad, Samantha and Thomas since her marriage to Prince Harry, 38, in 2018, after the former Hollywood lighting director reportedly staged a set of paparazzi photos.
Lawyers representing Meghan said in 2022 as part of a defamation lawsuit lodged by Samantha against the duchess it was impossible to prove someone was lying when it came to the expression of their feelings about how they grew up.
A filing from Meghan’s legal team said: “It is hard to imagine a more personal and subjective feeling than how one views their own childhood... Meghan’s response to that question that she ‘grew up as an only child’ [in the Oprah Winfrey interview] 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 won the defamation lawsuit brought against her by Samantha who accused her of making “demonstrably false and malicious statements” to a ”worldwide audience” after the Oprah sit-down.
