Meghan Markle made her half-sister “look like a fake opportunist,” Samantha Markle’s lawyer told Newsweek while explaining why his client is filing an appeal over a court ruling.
In March, the Duchess of Sussex won a libel lawsuit brought by Samantha, but now faces the prospect of the case going to appeal.
When Samantha first brought the lawsuit in 2022, Meghan’s lawyer Michael Kump suggested they would “give it the minimum attention necessary, which is all it deserves.” Yet two years on, they have not entirely rid themselves of it.
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Peter Ticktin, Samantha’s lawyer, told Newsweek: “We could see how wrong the judge was, and with all due respect to her honor, we knew immediately that this bad decision needed to be reversed.”
Samantha sued over comments Meghan made to Oprah Winfrey suggesting they did not have a relationship and that she grew up as an only child.
Meghan’s team argued the characterization was a matter of opinion and could not be disproved and the judge agreed that it was not possible to definitively determine how close the two half-sisters actually were.
“The judge saw the case exactly as the defense counsel saw it,” Ticktin said, “one bite at a time, instead of the whole meal which Meghan Markle served.
“For instance, it is really not harmful if you were to say that you hardly knew your brother, assuming you have one.
“However, if it was in the context of his writing a book about you and you made many more statements, each of which, on their own were not harmful, but collectively, made you look like a fake opportunist, the understanding of the harm would be different.”
Other statements Samantha complained of include passages of Meghan’s Netflix documentary in which she suggested the pair had never lived together.
“I was with my mom during the week,” the duchess said in her Harry & Meghan series, “and with my dad on the weekends.
“And my dad lived alone, he had two adult children who had moved out
of his house.”
“I don’t remember seeing her when I was a kid at my dad’s house,” she continued, “if and when they would come around.”
However, Judge Charlene Edwards Honeywell ruled that “at worst, it is a ‘minor and immaterial inaccuracy,'” adding: “It is not plausible that [Samantha would be exposed to hatred, ridicule, or contempt as a result of this statement.”
She said Meghan’s account of how their time was divided “is substantially true based on [Samantha’s] own allegations. Falsity only exists if a publication is substantially and materially false, not just technically false.”
Jack Royston is Newsweek‘s chief royal correspondent based in London. You can find him on X, formerly Twitter, at @jack_royston and read his stories on Newsweek’s The Royals Facebook page.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.