Defamation lawsuit by Meghan Markle’s half-sister dismissed by Florida judge
- Samantha Markle filed the lawsuit over comments about her in an unauthorised biography and in an interview with Oprah Winfrey
- The judge dismissed Samantha’s claims based on the biography because she ‘cannot plausibly allege’ that Meghan published the book
A Florida judge dismissed Samantha Markle’s defamation lawsuit against her estranged half-sister Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, according to court documents.
Samantha filed the lawsuit in Tampa, Florida, in March 2022 as a result of comments made about her in the 2020 book Finding Freedom, an unauthorised biography about Meghan and Prince Harry written by Carolyn Durand and Omid Scobie, as well as comments made by Meghan in her interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021.
As previously reported, a major part of Samantha’s lawsuit was based on a 2018 email between Meghan and Jason Knauf, then-communications secretary at Kensington Palace, about a meeting he was due to have with the authors of Finding Freedom.
The email was released by Meghan’s lawyers in court documents in 2022 relating to her privacy lawsuit against the Mail on Sunday.
Samantha said defamatory comments about her in the email ended up in the book, including that she did not graduate high school and that she had three children from three different fathers.
However, Meghan’s lawyer previously said that these comments never made it to print, while others either weren’t in the email or were substantially true, and therefore weren’t defamatory.
