Samantha Markle, the half-sister of Meghan Markle, gave a scathing assessment of the media treatment she faced in the days leading up to her sister’s marriage to Prince Harry.
In an interview with Breitbart, Markle said the press rarely portrayed her accurately and compared her treatment there to the Salem Witch Trials.
“In my interviews, I’ve said so many positive things, but they never printed those … They go so far now as to rise to levels of slander and defamation and I feel that they’ve taken this too far, because they know that the lawsuits won’t hurt them financially as much as the lack of sales will,” Markle told reporter Charlie Nash.
“Like in Salem, the bigger the lie, the bigger the sensationalism, the bigger the bite around something… Once you create that emotionally involved public swell, you can’t de-escalate it,” she added. “Nobody wants to look at the facts at that point because they’re so blinded by a flood of emotion and testosterone, and it’s impossible to backtrack, even with the truth, when the truth is good.”
Meghan Markle became the Duchess of Sussex and a member of the British royal family after she married Prince Harry on May 19, 2018.
Samantha and Meghan share Thomas Markle Sr. as their father. The elder Markle, who is divorced from Meghan’s mother, has been described as “estranged” from the family in media reports and lives in Mexico. Samantha is a daughter of Markle Sr from a different marriage.
As she alluded to in her interview with Breitbart, media reports about her relationship with Meghan have been harsh, particularly among the British tabloids. The Sun reported that Samantha Markle called her sister “shallow” and a “social climber” and was upset about not being invited to the wedding.