In this week’s Gossip with Celebitchy podcast (which will be out on Saturday!), CB and I talked about Netflix’s Harry & Meghan and whether there was much “new” information. If you’ve read Finding Freedom, you probably do know a lot about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s courtship already, although the Netflix show definitely had tons of never-before-seen personal photos and videos. In the third episode, there was some really big new information though: the introduction of Meghan’s niece to the narrative. Meghan’s niece Ashleigh is Samantha Markle/Grant’s daughter. Samantha lost custody of Ashleigh when Ashleigh was very young, and Ashleigh was raised by her paternal grandparents. Ashleigh reconnected with Samantha in adulthood, and Thomas Markle told Meghan about it and Meghan asked for her niece’s number. They began talking and hanging out and Meghan was the “cool aunt” who took her niece on trips, etc. Meghan was basically a big sister to her niece and they were and are very close. When it came time time to send out the wedding invitations though, Kensington Palace told Meghan that she shouldn’t invite Ashleigh.
In the new Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex shared that while she was not close to her half-sister Samantha Markle, she had a close bond with Samantha’s daughter, Ashleigh Hale. However, things got tricky when it came to the guest list for the couple’s royal wedding in 2018.
“How do we explain that this half-sister isn’t invited to the wedding, but that the half-sister’s daughter is?” said Meghan, 41. “With Ashleigh, the guidance at the time was to not have her come to our wedding. I was in the car with H. I had her on speakerphone and we talked her through what guidance we were given and why this assessment was made … and that’s painful.”
“I think I said I was hurt on some level, but I understood where it was coming from,” Ashleigh said. “To know that it was because of my biological mother that this relationship that’s so important to me was impacted in that way … to feel like, because of her it was taken away, has been hard.”
Ashleigh, an immigration attorney, said she and her brother were raised by their paternal grandparents, whom she considers her parents. She had not seen Samantha, 58, since she was 6 until they reconnected in 2007. That was also when Meghan reached out to her niece — a relationship that started with “these long emails back to each other,” Ashleigh recalled. “And then texts and calls. After a while, I think we were talking, on some level, several days a week.”
Meghan said that she believes she and Ashleigh “craved the same thing,” explaining, “I wanted a sister, and she was like a little sister. Ash was put through quite a bit by the media, just by association. And I didn’t want her life to be plagued with all that drama.”
Added Ashleigh of the time when Meghan’s relationship with Harry, 38, became public, “After the news first broke, Samantha pretty quickly began expressing a lot of angry words about Meg towards me. What was communicated to me was maybe some resentment. And it felt like no matter what I said, her perspective didn’t change and seemed to get angrier and bigger, and we stopped talking. Some people you just can’t reason with.”
I realize that Meghan was, at that time, in her people-pleaser mode and she didn’t want to ruffle feathers, but I kind of feel like she should have argued with the palace about inviting Ashleigh to the wedding. It would have been such a smart move that would have spoken volumes about Meghan’s lack of relationship with Samantha, but emphasized that Meghan is very close to Ashleigh (the daughter Samantha didn’t raise).
Meghan also spoke on camera about how the British media wanted the Black side of her family to be dramatic, but it was “the other side of my family that is just acting differently.” The White Markles are awful. Meghan spoke about Samantha too:
“My half-sister, who I hadn’t seen for over a decade, and that was only for a day and a half — suddenly it felt like she was everywhere. I don’t know your middle name. I don’t know your birthday. You’re telling these people that you raised me and you’ve coined me Princess Pushy….
“I don’t remember seeing [Samantha] when I was a kid at my dad’s house, if and when they would come around. And then the last time that I saw her that I remember is when I was in my early 20s. I hadn’t had [a falling] out with her. We didn’t have a closeness to be able to have that. And I wanted a sister!”
Yeah, Samantha was always vile trash. But she didn’t do that alone – the British media platformed her and paid her to hate on Meghan and they all did so gleefully. Anyway, this is the point in the story where I believe there were some insidious forces working against Meghan – this was the lead-up to the wedding, the bullsh-t with Thomas Markle, and the palace working against Meghan already.
Photos courtesy of Netflix.
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