While Prince Harry’s complicated relationship with his family tends to take center stage, he’s not the only one struggling with his relatives.
Meghan Markle has long had issues with her father Thomas Markle and half-sister Samantha Markle, especially after rocketing to royal fame upon her engagement to the Duke of Sussex. Now, in the first part of the couple’s six-episode docuseries Harry & Meghan, which premiered on Netflix on Thursday, she’s opening up about her side of the feud.
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As Perezcious readers know, around the time of Harry and Meghan’s 2018 wedding, the Suits alum had a major falling out with her father, who ultimately didn’t attend the ceremony. He first made headlines for reportedly accepting money from a British paparazzo and staging photos of himself prepping for the big day. Then, TMZ published an article claiming he would NOT be walking the 41-year-old down the aisle, and apparently, this is how the news was broken to the bride-to-be. She exclaimed:
“I’m finding out that you’re not coming to our wedding … through a tabloid!”
Harsh AF!
Just four days before the wedding, Thomas made headlines again as he was hospitalized due to a heart attack, which the actress was similarly left in the dark about. She reflected:
“And then suddenly they were saying he was in the hospital. I said, ‘What’s going on? Please just pick up the phone.’”
Text messages between the estranged father-daughter duo were then shown on screen, revealing the former lighting director for TV soap operas and sitcoms hadn’t responded to his daughter, despite speaking to the media. This led Meghan to text her father and ask him to stop talking to the press, she wrote:
“You haven’t returned any of our 20+ calls since we all spoke on Saturday morning; which only adds to the hurt you’ve been causing.”
Oof.
As we all know, Thomas and Meghan continue to have a very difficult — and pretty much nonexistent — relationship. Even Queen Elizabeth II picked up on the troublesome estrangement before her death, royal expert Katie Nicholl wrote in her book The New Royals:
“The Queen could see how damaging the situation was between Meghan and her father, and she did speak to Meghan about it and tried to encourage her to talk to Thomas.”
Now it seems as though the 38-year-old royal is taking on the guilt for his wife’s detachment from her dad, he expressed:
“She had a father before this, and now she doesn’t have a father. And I shouldered that. If Meg wasn’t with me, then her dad would still be her dad.”
Yeesh. That’s a lot to take responsibility for!
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Meanwhile, Meghan also opened up at length about her estranged half-sister, Samantha, accusing Thomas’ other daughter of fabricating their relationship amid her royal fame.
While Samantha has claimed the pair go way back and had a major falling out around the time the Archetypes podcast host was set to get married, Meghan insists she doesn’t remember seeing her half-sister as a kid while at her father’s home. (She and her mother Doria Ragland moved out of when Meghan was 2 years old.) She went on to say she hadn’t seen the 58-year-old “for over a decade,” and even then, it was “for only a day and a half,” she explained:
“The last time I saw her that I remember was when I was in my early 20s.”
Meg continued:
“I don’t know your middle name. I don’t know your birthday. You’re telling these people you raised me, and you coined me Princess Pushy? I hadn’t had a fallout with her. We didn’t have a closeness to be able to have that. And I wanted a sister!”
Nevertheless, a statement appeared on the screen, noting:
“Samantha Markle maintains that she and Meghan had a close relationship until 2018 and that the media fabricated quotes that have been attributed to her.”
In a unique confessional of her own, Samantha’s daughter, Ashleigh Hale, claimed her mother felt “resentment” toward Meghan as her romance with Harry heated up, and it only “seemed to get angrier and bigger.” Yeesh. Not only did it cause problems between the half-sisters, but it did for their mother-daughter relationship, too:
“We stopped talking. You know, some people you just can’t reason with.”
Ashleigh was adopted by her paternal grandparents at an early age, but she “reconnected” with her mom in 2007, which then led her to form a close bond with Meghan via Thomas. She dished:
“It started out with these long emails back and forth to each other and then texts and calls. After a while, I think we were talking on some level several days a week.”
She then called Meg a “maternal” figure, a “sister,” and a “best friend,” all of which Meghan agreed with. Noting how they “hit it off,” the Duchess of Sussex added:
“We both craved the same thing. I wanted a sister, and she was like a little sister.”
Hmm. So inneresting how she was able to have a relationship with Ashleigh and not Samantha! Perhaps that has caused some resentment as well?? Hale’s mom has taken aim at Meg several times over the years, including in the older Markle’s memoir, The Diary of Princess Pushy’s Sister Part 1. In March, she sued Meghan over alleged “false and malicious statements” made in her Oprah Winfrey interview, but in June, the Archewell co-founder’s lawyer called the defamation suit “meritless” in court docs, arguing:
“Courts are not equipped to adjudicate the legitimacy of a person’s feelings about their childhood and relationships. Nor should they be.”
Clearly, Meghan still has such a messy and complicated relationship with her family! It’s a bummer this romance has torn them both from their relatives… Thoughts, Perezcious readers? SOUND OFF (below)!
[Image via MEGA/WENN & Good Morning Britain/60 Minutes Australia/YouTube]
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