The docuseries featuring Meghan Markle and Prince Harry contains interviews with friends and family members who have never come up before, including Meghan’s niece Ashleigh, the biological daughter of her half-sister Samantha Markle. While Meghan and Samantha have no contact, Meghan is quite close to Ashleigh, who was reared by her grandparents.
“There’s a sister element, there’s something maternal, she’s a best friend, she’s kinda all the things,” Ashleigh explained during her on-camera interview, while Meghan noted, “I wanted a sister and she was like a little sister. Ash was put through quite a bit by the media just through association. I didn’t want her life to be plagued with all that drama.” Ashleigh also said that she stopped talking to Samantha because of her behavior toward Meghan.
“After the news first broke Samatha pretty quickly began expressing a lot of angry words about Meg towards me,” she said. “What was communicated to me was maybe some resentment, and it felt like no matter what I said, you know, her perspective didn’t change and seemed to get angrier and bigger, and we stopped talking. Some people you just can’t reason with.”
Due to Samantha’s actions, Meghan and Harry’s team decided it was best for Ashleigh not to attend the royal wedding. “How do we explain that this half-sister isn’t invited to the wedding but the half-sister’s daughter is,” Meghan said of her comms team’s position.
“So with Ashleigh, the guidance at the time was to not have her come to our wedding. I was in the car with H, and I called her and we had her on speakerphone and we talked her through what guidance we were being given and why this assessment was being made and…and that’s painful.”
Meanwhile, Ashleigh tearfully recounted, “I think I said I was hurt on some level but I understood where it was coming from. 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 and Meghan appear to have remained close based on Ashleigh’s decision to join in this docuseries, so maybe we’ll hear more from her when Volume II is released on December 15.