Meghan Markle has a complicated relationship with her family, to put it mildly. Her father has discussed their estrangement in endless interviews and now her sister has decided to sue Meghan for defamation.
While Meghan hasn’t seen her half-sister for 19 years, Samantha she alleges that the Duchess of Sussex made ‘false’ statements about their joint childhood during her TV interview with Oprah last year.
Samantha alleges that Meghan made several ‘false and malicious statements’ about their time growing up together in the interview. She also claims that the ‘rags to royalty’ story is false and that they didn’t grow up in ‘virtual poverty’ as Meghan suggested.
Meghan’s half-sister claims that their father Thomas paid for ‘elite and expensive private schools’, acting and dancing classes, and supported Meghan through Northwestern University. However, Meghan has stated in the past that she worked throughout her degree to pay for tuition.
The lawsuit comes after Samantha published a tell-all memoir last year about her childhood with Meghan, (charmingly) titled The Diary of Princess Pushy’s Sister Part 1—which did not perform well on the sales stands.
In the legal documents obtained by TMZ, Samantha claims that Meghan’s portrayal of their childhood in her Oprah interview damaged the sales of her autobiography, caused her emotional and mental distress, and stopped her from getting jobs.
Of course, memory is subjective. And siblings will often have conflicting versions of how their childhood played out. Psychologist Dorothy Rowe noted that when siblings are young, they fight to get their parents’ attention. But when they’re older ‘siblings battle over who has the most truthful, accurate memory of their shared past.’
Sibling disagreements can be especially painful, because there’s a sense of betrayal and invasion when you perceive that someone close to you is re-writing the narrative of your own life.
From her statement, Samantha seems to feel betrayed that a version of her childhood, that she understands to be ‘false’ has been publicly circulated. But for Samantha to sue her half-sister, because her book (about her!) didn’t sell well seems almost too meta to digest.
Responding to the lawsuit, Michael Kump, Meghan’s lawyer, told TMZ: ‘This baseless and absurd lawsuit is just a continuation of a pattern of disturbing behaviour. We will give it the minimum attention necessary, which is all it deserves.’
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