Did Meghan Markle Actually Lie During Oprah Interview?

Back in 2021 Meghan Markle and prince Harry sat with Oprah Winfrey to talk about all sorts of emotional abuse the actress had to face in the UK. Many months later, the now-infamous interview is still making waves; Markle's half-sister Samantha sued her for defamation in the aftermath of the interview getting aired, and now she's claiming that some of Meghan's choice words were, in fact, a lie.

During the interview, Meghan shared some information about her childhood. Now, Thomas Markle's eldest daughter claims that her younger sister deliberately misrepresented a number of facts. For example, in a conversation with Oprah, Meghan mentioned that she grew up as an only child in the family – which Samantha says is obsiously not true.

In response to Samantha's claims, Meghan Markle's US legal team submitted papers to a court in Florida that justify the case's dismissal. The papers state that all the things the actress said about her childhood are actually a "textbook example of a subjective statement about how a person feels about her childhood" and therefore cannot be used against Markle in a defamation case, seeing as how Samantha's accusations "completely ignore the context of the statement". The context in question was Oprah asking Meghan about her actual relationship with Samantha.

It's not just the Oprah interview that did some damage to Samantha's delicate sensibilities, it seems: Meghan's half-sister is seeking $75,000 in damages over said interview and Finding Freedom biography, penned by Carolyn Durand and Omid Scobie and published in 2020. It was claimed that the book was written with the Duchess's contribution through a third-party source, but Meghan's legal team argues that, because the actress didn't actually write the tell-all herself, she cannot be hold responsible over what was written:

"Meghan did not make the statements; she cannot be liable for them. It is that simple."

The biography itself was a bit of a disaster, with readers claiming that the book was very one-sided and snide towards Kate Middleton. There was a big section about Meghan's relationship with her family (including her dad, half-sister and half-brother) where the writers "belittled" and "bad mouthed" Markle's relatives, according to some fans. All in all, after the book was published, the actual readers' reviews were mostly negative, branding Meghan Markle as "quite mentally unstable" and "a flaming narcissist" who apparently wrote the biography herself.