In a renewed legal battle nearly two years after a U.S. federal court dismissed her claims, Samantha Markle, half‑sister to Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, has reignited her defamation lawsuit against Meghan, alleging that statements made in public interviews and a Netflix documentary unfairly damaged her reputation.
The conflict traces back to March 2022, when Samantha sued Meghan in Florida for defamation. She claimed that Meghan had made “demonstrably false and malicious statements” in her 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey and had supplied false information used in the unauthorized biography Finding Freedom. Samantha also took issue with comments she asserts were made or implied in the Netflix series Harry & Meghan. Among her allegations: that Meghan misrepresented their growing‑up relationship by saying she grew up feeling like an “only child,” and that Samantha changed her surname back to “Markle” allegedly to benefit from Meghan’s public image.
In March 2023, the case faced its first major legal setback when U.S. District Judge Charlene Edwards Honeywell dismissed large portions of Samantha’s complaint. The judge ruled that Meghan could not be held liable for statements in Finding Freedom because Meghan did not publish the book. Statements made during the Oprah Winfrey interview were likewise dismissed because they were considered opinions, which in U.S. defamation law are typically non‑actionable unless they assert provable false facts.
Then, in March 2024, the case was dismissed with prejudice—meaning Samantha is barred from re‑filing the same claims—after the judge determined that she had “failed to identify any statements that could support a claim for defamation or defamation‑by‑implication.” The ruling held that Meghan’s statements were either true (or substantially true), non‑defamatory by their nature, or protected opinions.