Duchess Meghan’s half-sister, Samantha Markle, slammed her in the new documentary Meghan and the Markles: A Family at War, accusing the former Suits star of having “no heart.”
In the British documentary, which aired on Channel 5 in the U.K. on Friday, March 1, Markle took aim at Meghan, 37, over a letter she wrote last year to their father, Thomas Markle, telling him that he broke her heart “into a million pieces” by being involved in a staged paparazzi photo scandal ahead of her wedding and doing interviews in which he slammed Meghan and her husband, Prince Harry, as well as the royal family.
“She doesn’t have a heart or she would been doing everything she could to make him comfortable, and reciprocate, and be loving and gracious, and make sure he’s comfortable in his old age,” Samantha, 54, said in A Family at War. “So broken heart? No, his heart’s broken. She can’t turn herself into the victim here.”
Meghan and her father have been estranged since her May 2018 wedding, which he didn’t attend after suffering a heart attack in the wake of the headline-making photo scandal, which Samantha later admitted she’d helped to orchestrate.
The documentary looks at why no members of Meghan’s family except her mother, Doria Ragland, were present at her wedding at Windsor Castle in London, and documents the feud between the former actress and her relatives.
Samantha said that the animosity between them ramped up when Harry, 34, talked in a 2017 radio interview about his then-fiancée spending Christmas with the royal family at the Queen’s Sandringham estate. “It’s the family I suppose she’s never had,” Harry told BBC Radio 4, adding that his family “loved having” Meghan at the festivities.
Samantha said she believes Meghan is “embarrassed” by their family, including her half-brother, Thomas Markle Jr., who was arrested for DUI, and his son, Tyler Dooley, a cannabis farmer, who launched a marijuana line called Markle’s Sparkle.
“The first thing I thought was I don’t think Harry has been given the full story,” Samantha said. “Something was not right. Though we weren’t the classic family together on schedule for every holiday, we were family.”
“Then we questioned why — why would she be embarrassed about her family, why would you need to set the stage differently,” she continued. “It was starting to feel like she wasn’t reaching out to the family.”
“There is a lifespan of pictures and experiences together, so maybe it’s convenient for her that in her mind she doesn’t know us because she doesn’t want to, because she wants to take center stage,” Samantha said of her tweets criticizing the duchess, who is pregnant with her first child with Prince Harry. “I wasn’t maliciously lying. I was pointing out what the world was already seeing. I pointed out that humanitarians don’t treat their father coldly, was that a lie? No, because the world watched it happen to my dad and the world watched her do it.”
