Samantha Markle: Prince Harry and Meghan should apologise

Meghan Markle’s half-sister today used a British TV interview to lay into the Duke and Duchess of Sussex over their ‘incredibly wrong and shocking’ treatment of her father Thomas and declared: ‘They have quite a bit of apologising to do’.

Samantha Markle, 55, who is Mr Markle’s daughter from his first marriage, also claimed the couple’s bombshell decision to quit and emigrate to Canada would have been made by Meghan not her husband.

In a wide-ranging interview with ITV’s This Morning Ms Markle, who lives in Florida, claimed quitting as senior royals after just 20 months of marriage was a ‘gross breach of duty’ to the Queen.

She said today: ‘Prince Harry and Meghan have quite a bit of apologising to do. We aren’t talking about teenagers, we are talking about adults who knew what they were doing and in regards to my father it was so incredibly wrong and shocking’.

She also said Meghan initially enjoyed the attention of being a royal, accusing her of adopting a ‘contrived British accent’, but wanted out once she was criticised about her ‘spending’.

Ms Markle also appeared to deny that the criticisms of her half-sister were laced with racism, calling the claim: ‘A misplacement of blame to avoid accountability’.

And she said Meghan’s legal against the Mail on Sunday is ‘ludicrous’ – and warned her the ‘truth’ will come out if it gets to the High Court.

She told Eamonn and Ruth on ITV’s This Morning Ms Markle, that Meghan and Harry’s decision was a ‘gross breach of duty’ to the Queen

Samantha Markle, pictured with her half-sister Meghan Markle at her graduation in 2008 –  but they have fallen out badly and are estranged

Meghan and Samantha’s father Thomas, who lives in Mexico, could be forced to give evidence against his Duchess daughter in London over a claim she brought against the Mail on Sunday after he shared a letter she sent to him from Kensington Palace.

He also claimed he messaged his daughter saying he couldn’t come to her wedding because of emergency heart surgery and received a text that appeared to be from Prince Harry that admonished him, accused him of causing hurt to his daughter and did not ask about his health.

Samantha Markle said today it would be her half-sister, not Harry, who will have made the final decision to quit as frontline royals.

She said: ‘From my perception, I feel that she [Meghan] did enjoy it when there was the fab four and the photographs of her hair blowing in the wind and the smiling and the contrived British accent.

‘But when the public state to criticise the behaviour and expenditure the tune changed and it became a bit more attribution error, avoiding accountability, flipping the script, and it’s quite hurtful I’ve never seen anything that was racist in nature so it seems a misplacement of blame to avoid accountability. 

She added: ‘I just thought it was a gross breach of duty or honour and confidence that was placed on her’. 

A young Meghan is pictured with her father Thomas Markle, from whom she is also estranged. Her mother Doria was the only relative who attended the royal wedding after Mr Markle fell ill

She has said their father Thomas is ready for a showdown with the Duchess ‘in a trial of the century’ and told the BBC: ‘If he is called, he will come.’ 

It comes after defence papers revealed this week that Associated Newspapers, the Mail on Sunday’s publisher, could call Mr Markle, 75, as its star witness against Meghan.

The Duchess of Sussex is suing Associated Newspapers for publishing a letter she wrote to her father in August 2018 in which chastised him for speaking to the press and how he had ‘broken her heart into a million pieces’. 

Samantha Markle has previously been highly critical in interviews about Meghan’s character, including calling her a ‘social climber with a soft spot for gingers’.

And last week she branded Meghan and Harry’s decision to step back as senior members of the Royal Family as a ‘slap in the face’.

She lives in Florida, but it appears unlikely that Meghan and Harry moving to North America will lead to a thawing of relations between the half-sisters.

Ms Markle has previously blamed Meghan for freezing out their father and other members of the family, called her ‘inhumane’ and ‘the Duchess of Nonsense’.

Mr Markle, 75, has given lawyers previously unseen text messages sent in the build-up to Meghan’s wedding to Prince Harry that reveal the breakdown of the relationship between father and daughter.

Some of the messages were detailed this week in defence papers filed at the High Court in London. 

The documents say that after Mr Markle messaged his daughter saying he couldn’t come to her wedding because he had been rushed to hospital for emergency heart surgery and told not to fly on health grounds, he received a text that appeared to be from Prince Harry.  

The message admonished him, accused him of causing hurt to his daughter and did not ask about his health. It left Mr Markle ‘deeply hurt’.

In return, Mr Markle wrote: ‘I’ve done nothing to hurt you Meghan or anyone else … I’m sorry my heart attack is … any inconvenience for you.’

The Duchess of Sussex launched legal action against Associated Newspapers last year after it published extracts of a letter she wrote to her father in August 2018.

Meghan, 38, has accused the newspaper – the sister paper of the Daily Mail – of breaching her privacy, her data protection rights and her copyright when it published extracts.

The MoS filed its defence to her case at the High Court in London this week. It denied her claims and argued there was a ‘huge and legitimate public interest’ in the Royal Family, including its ‘personal and family relationships’.

The defence papers also said:

• Thomas Markle only released Meghan’s letter to the world to show it was not the ‘loving’ plea her friends had been making out;
• He had kept her handwritten note private for months, and only revealed it to expose ‘false’ claims that the duchess had been reaching out to repair their relationship;
• He only decided to release extracts of the letter to the Press after she had allowed her friends to talk about it first in the US magazine People;
• That one of Meghan’s best friends, Jessica Mulroney, once intervened to try to fix a ‘favourable’ press article for the duchess;
• Mr Markle had insisted he made multiple attempts to contact his daughter by phone call and by text message, but received no response;
• That apart from the August 2018 letter, Mr Markle had not heard from his daughter since he told her he was too ill to attend her wedding. He had never been introduced to her husband Prince Harry, nor met his eight-month-old grandson Archie.

Meghan was spotted this week leaving the $14million Vancouver Island home where she and Prince Harry stayed over the holidays with their son Archie. Shown here visiting a charity in the city

The latest development in the court case has come in a turbulent week which has seen the Queen hold crisis talks about Meghan and Harry’s role in the Royal Family after they announced their wish to step back from their royal duties.

The duchess was last night pictured in Canada for the first time since she returned there following the bombshell ‘Megxit’ statement. She was seen boarding a sea plane from Vancouver Island which appeared to be destined for Whistler ski resort.

Meghan launched her legal action against the MoS last year after it published excerpts of her letter to her father. Mr Markle gave the letter to the newspaper after unnamed friends of the duchess told the People magazine that she had written the ‘loving’ letter in an attempt to repair their relationship.

Lawyers for the newspaper alleged that Meghan had ‘knowingly’ allowed her friends to leak details of the letter to the magazine – effectively that she had helped to breach her own privacy.

If the case goes before a judge, the paper said it would ask for Meghan to be forced to hand over all communications in which she had ’caused or permitted her friends to provide information about her to the media or to seek to influence what is published about her’.

It could lead to the prospect of Meghan coming face-to-face with her father in the High Court.

Mr Markle, a retired Hollywood lighting director who lives in Rosarito, Mexico, has said his daughter cut off all contact with him after her wedding, except for the letter at the centre of the case.

If he were to be called as a witness, he would effectively have to brand his own daughter a liar who had invaded her own privacy. The Sussexes have said they will fund the legal proceedings privately.