Inside the lonely life of Meghan Markle’s older sister Samantha: As she turns 60 today she will be celebrating in isolation due to estrangement from BOTH of her daughters – as well as a long-running feud with the Duchess which led to defamation battle

When Samantha Markle heard the news in October 2016 that her half-sister Meghan was the mystery woman who had been secretly dating a British prince she did not have a typical reaction.

Instead of being happy and celebrating that her sibling had caught herself a catch and that she could soon become a wildly wealthy duchess, Samantha was sour.

And her feelings seemed to burst out when, just two days after the relationship news broke, she appeared on the front page of The Sun with the glaring headline: ‘Don’t fall for my little sis, Harry, she’d be the next PRINCESS PUSHY.’

It was just the beginning of what would be an onslaught of bad press for the future duchess from her now estranged sister. 

Samantha became prolific in the news and would do interviews for programmes such as Good Morning Britain to criticise her younger sister, labelling her ‘shallow’ and a ‘social climber’.

Tensions reached an all-time-high after she decided to take Meghan to court after she alleged she had been defamed by her in her tell-all interview with Oprah in 2021.

She challenged Meghan’s claims that she ‘grew up as an only child’ and didn’t have much of a relationship with her sibling – saying it hurt the sales of her self-published book, The Diary Of Princess Pushy’s Sister Part 1.

Samantha also claims she was ‘forced to move residences, retract from public outings’ and ‘faced realistic death threats’ as a result of the royal’s Netflix documentary, according to a court filing.

She was seeking $75,000 in damages for the alleged defamation but lost the case. However, she has refused to give up the long-running feud, and her lawyer appealed the ruling in April.

But Meghan is not the only close family member Samantha has a difficult relationship with.

Both of her daughters, Ashleigh Hale, 39, and Noel Rasmussen, 25, have previously spoken to the press claiming they have no contact with their mother.

Her third child, a son called Christopher, 38, was raised alongside Ashleigh by their paternal grandparents who later adopted them. 

Ashleigh featured in Harry and Meghan’s Netflix documentary to say she doesn’t speak to Samantha after being raised by her grandparents from the age of six.

Meanwhile Noel spoke out against Samantha’s constant sniping against Meghan in the lead-up to the Royal wedding in 2018.

She said she was ’embarrassed’ by the way her mother and other relatives had treated Meghan since the news of the engagement broke. 

The fraught family relationships mean Samantha, who turns 60 today, will be spending her birthday in isolation.

Samantha was 17 when her father Thomas, and her new stepmother, Doria Ragland, brought another member of the Markle clan into the world – Meghan.

It was 1981 and, although Samantha and her brother Thomas Jr came from their father’s previous marriage which ended in divorce in the early 1970s, the blended family were all now living under the same roof in Santa Monica.

But what followed was not domestic bliss. It has been claimed that Thomas Markle was so besotted with gorgeous Meghan that his other daughter quickly became an afterthought.

The arrival of Meghan caused the awkward teenager to feel even more displaced and unattractive, describing her own appearance as like a ‘pear on stilts’, according to royal expert Tina Brown.

And despite Meghan’s parents breaking up when she was two, Samantha continued to see her half-sister over the years.

The resentment only grew when Thomas sent Meghan to a series of elite private schools – allowing her to be the first Markle to get into college.

To make matters worse, after the failure of her own attempt at acting, Samantha was then forced to watch as Meghan’s career took off, while she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2008 and ended up in a wheelchair.

Brown, author of the bestselling royal book The Palace Papers, who had lunch with Princess Diana two months before her death in 1997, wrote that the jealousy inside Samantha had ‘curdled’. 

And it seems time has not healed the wound, as despite Samantha saying she last saw Meghan in 2008 when the now Duchess of Sussex flew to see her graduate at the age of 44, Samantha remains bitter. 

When it comes to Meghan’s side of the story, she has stayed fairly quiet about Samantha – despite the constant barrage of insults from her sister.

A rare insight was gleaned when an email sent in 2018 to her then-communications secretary was made public as part of a privacy and copyright lawsuit the Duchess filed against the publishers of the Mail on Sunday), which revealed she accused Samantha of having begun ‘a career creating stories to sell to the Press’.

Samantha and Meghan’s early years spent together

But Samantha and Meghan’s relationship was not always so fraught.

Samantha, who is also known by the name of Samantha Grant, was born in Chicago on November 24, 1964.

Along with her brother, Thomas Jr, they are the children from Thomas Markle’s first marriage to Roslyn Markle. Their mother, who now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was married to Thomas between 1964 and 1975.

His second wife was Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, and they welcomed their only child, Meghan, on August 4, 1981.

Much of what has been said about Samantha and Meghan’s childhood comes from Samantha’s aforementioned memoir, released in January 2021.

The shocking book’s blurb stated that its aim was to ‘share the truth about her life and family against all odds and ultimatums’.

In it, she pulls no punches and lays into her half-sister, describing her as a ‘monster’, ‘cold-hearted’ and ‘controlling’. 

But there also also interesting anecdotes about her experience growing up around the future Duchess of Sussex.

The book details the Markle siblings’ upbringing, including the rivalry between Meghan and Samantha which began when their father was still married to Doria. 

One story details that, just before her first birthday, Meghan threw blueberries around the kitchen as her father laughed in delight. ‘We didn’t laugh about cleaning up the mess, though,’ Samantha adds.

Samantha shared how she even invested in hair extensions and tanning beds due to inspiration from her sister, but lamented how the extensions started to fall out and she was left with ‘several thinning areas’. 

But she also wrote of her adoration for her half-sister as a baby, and described the infant as ‘bi-racial, beautiful, … the color of a peach, and a rose’.

However, it wasn’t until the Sussexes’ 2021 interview with Oprah that Meghan began to make her only claims about their childhood, which contrasted with her sister’s. 

The Duchess claimed to only have seen her half-sister a handful of times growing up.

‘I grew up as an only child, which everyone who grew up around me knows, and I wished I had siblings. I would have loved to have had siblings,’ she said.

And in the 2022 Netflix docuseries Meghan said she knew little about her half-sister.

She said: ‘The UK media wanted my mom’s side of my family to be the ones that all this drama could be stirred up with. And they just had my mom who is classy and quiet, and then you have the other side of the family which is just acting differently.

‘My half-sister [Samantha Markle] 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, and you’re telling people that you raised me and you’ve coined me “Princess Pushy”?’

Meghan added: ‘I don’t remember seeing her [Samantha] when I was a kid. The last time that I saw her I remember was when I was in my early 20s. 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!’

Samantha previously told the Daily Mail she last saw her sister in 2008, when Samantha graduated from university and Meghan flew in for her big day. 

After graduating, Samantha followed in her father’s footsteps and worked in the entertainment industry for several years as a writer and an actress. 

But she struggled with her finances and filed for personal bankruptcy in 2003. Her brother Thomas Jr also filed for bankruptcy in 2012. 

Both her marriages, to Earl Hale and Scott Rasmussen, ended in divorce.

Samantha lost touch with Meghan after she made it big and landed a role on the legal drama Suits. 

In an interview in 2018, Samantha told ITV’s Loose Women that the pair last spoke in 2015. 

Discussing their last conversation, Samantha said: ‘I was concerned about my father and so I called her in Canada.’

Samantha’s estranged daughter Ashleigh 

Samantha’s estranged daughter Ashleigh featured in Harry and Meghan’s Netflix documentary because she is one of the Duchess’s best friends.

The Sussexes’ Netflix documentary shed light on the complicated relationship between Meghan, her half-sister, and her niece Ashleigh.

Meghan and Samantha have been estranged for years and, likewise, Ashleigh, 39, told the programme that she doesn’t speak to her mother, having been brought up by her paternal grandparents. 

But thanks to her father Thomas Markle, Meghan was able to reconnect with her niece in around 2007. 

Meghan said: ‘My dad said that Samantha had found her daughter and I remember saying, “Oh, if you have her email address, I want to email her”.

‘I think we both crave the same thing. I wanted a sister, and she was like a little sister.’

But when it came to drawing up the guest list for her nuptials to Prince Harry, Ashleigh was not invited, apparently because of the frosty relations between Meghan and Samantha.

Samantha previously took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to express her distaste that neither she nor Meghan’s half-brother were invited to the Sussexes’ 2018 wedding at St George’s Chapel in Windsor.

Meghan’s father Thomas also did not attend after he was found to be arranging with paparazzi to stage photos for cash during the build-up to the wedding. 

Samantha wrote at the time: ‘Out of respect and humanitarianism, the Markles should be invited if 2,000 complete strangers are. Our uncle, brother, me, best friend of 30 years, nephews. At issue is not a matter of closeness. Family is family.’

In her memoir, Samantha claimed that Meghan ordered their father to disown his children from his first marriage if he wanted an invitation to her wedding.

According to the book, Meghan told Thomas Markle to divorce himself from Samantha and her brother Thomas by saying: ‘You don’t need them!’

Her father refused and supposedly said: ‘I love you all equally’, to which Meghan replied: ‘Why can’t you just comply?’

Samantha’s estranged daughter Noel 

Meanwhile Samantha’s other estranged daughter Noel Rasmussen, spoke to the press in the lead-up to the royal wedding in 2018 to slam her behaviour.

She said sniping at the bride-to-be was ‘ripping the family apart’ and called for the Markles to have a truce and support the Suits actress on her big day. 

At the time she was studying anthropology and lived with her grandmother, Roslyn Markle, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. 

Noel has previously said her mother’s vendetta against Meghan is fuelled by hate.

She told the Mail in 2018: ‘When [Meghan] started dating Prince Harry, [Samantha] got an interest in Meghan which she had never had before.

‘She wanted to be nice, to be friends, to say how much she loves her sister – but after years of telling me and the rest of the family how much she hates Meghan, how much of a narcissist Meghan apparently is and what a horrible woman Meghan is, which isn’t true at all.’

‘Of course my mother doesn’t like Meghan. This she’s told me starting from a very early age,’ she said.

‘She hasn’t liked Meghan since essentially she was born. She’s told me stories about how she didn’t want her around and how she never asked for Meghan.

‘She’s just been overall jealous of Meghan as soon as she got famous and began taking jobs like, for example, [Beverly Hills] 90210. And of course, when she got Suits, that set her off.

‘After however many years, she’s just completely bashed Meghan, said the most horrible things about her to the entire family, and just been completely jealous of her.

‘She hasn’t shown her any type of love or appreciation unless she wants money. That’s it.’

Samantha decides to sue Meghan 

Nevertheless, following the wedding, Samantha remained furious about the snub and continued her frequent media appearances to criticise her half-sister.

Then, in 2022, she decided to take the unprecedented step of suing Meghan.

The case was originally filed in March of that year, and in legal filings Samantha detailed at length how she was ‘very close’ to Meghan when they grew up in Los Angeles. 

Samantha helped Meghan with her homework, took her shopping and had a ‘wonderful relationship’ with her, it was claimed.

But once Meghan became famous thanks to the TV series Suits, she ‘no longer had time’ for Samantha, and by 2016 they had stopped visiting each other, it was claimed.

The lawsuit said that once Meghan met Harry she became ‘hostile’ to Samantha as well as the rest of her family.

The ‘defining moment’ of Meghan’s ‘unwarranted hostility’ towards Meghan happened in 2017 when the Duchess allegedly ‘hung up the phone immediately’ upon hearing Samantha’s voice.

Samantha called back but ‘to this day Meghan has never returned Samantha’s phone call’, she claimed.

Since then Meghan has ‘belligerently attempted to malign Samantha and other family members’, the lawsuit stated. Meghan’s method is to ‘terminate friendships, rather than save them, and for her to become hostile’, it claimed. 

After that it is alleged that Meghan ‘started her smear campaign and ongoing deluge of distorted facts and stories, complete with fake quotes about and “by” Samantha’. 

But the suit was eventually dismissed with prejudice in March 2024, meaning that it cannot simply be refiled. 

Judge Charlene Edwards Honeywell said that the case should be dismissed because Samantha ‘failed to identify any statements that could support a claim for defamation’. 

The decision spared Meghan from a trial which was set to take place at the court in Tampa.  

In her 58-page ruling, Judge Honeywell said that Meghan’s statements could not be defamatory because they are ‘substantially true based on judicially noticed evidence’ or ‘not capable of being considered defamatory.’

Samantha had failed to ‘plausibly allege that they are defamatory in the first place’, the judge said.

But Samantha has vowed to continue her legal campaign against her estranged sister, and in April her lawyer filed an appeal.

The case is currently at the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit after Samantha lost at Federal Court in the Middle District of Florida. 

In the documents, which have been seen by the US outlet Newsweek, Prince Harry is wrongly referred to by his brother William’s title ‘Prince of Wales’ a total of nine times.

Meanwhile Meghan, who has now moved to California with Harry, continues her long-running policy of ignoring Samantha.

Despite apparently spending a lot of time together growing up, Samantha has never been further apart from her sister.