Meghan Markle's half-sister has claimed she defamed her to "cover up" a "false rags to riches" narrative, a court has heard.
The Duchess of Sussex is currently being sued by Samantha Markle for "defamation and injurious falsehood" regarding her and Prince Harry's bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021.
The 58-year-old former model is currently seeking $75,000 (£62,000) in damages over comments made about her in the interview and in a biography named Finding Freedom, which was published a year earlier.
The Telegraph reports Samantha claims the comments subjected her to “humiliation, shame and hatred on a worldwide scale”.
Samantha, the elder daughter of Thomas Markle, Meghan's dad, claimed in a court filing submitted in Florida last March that "demonstrably false and malicious statements" had been made by her younger sister to a "worldwide audience".
Meghan's legal team is trying to get the case thrown out, and, in a court session conducted via Zoom on Wednesday, a motion to dismiss the case was heard by Florida judge Charlene Edwards Honeywell, the Daily Mail reports
Samantha's lawyer Peter Ticktin further claimed that Meghan used the book to "affirm this false narrative that she supposedly lived this rags to riches thing".
The newspaper reported that he said: "She got caught. She was lying about her education, that she was getting all these scholarships. Her father paid for her education for goodness sakes, and she got caught with this lie.
"Why else is she putting her sister down? Why else is she putting her father down?
"Why else is she denying her family who has done nothing but good to her all her life? She never had a problem with them at all."
Mr Ticktin went on to say that Meghan was acting this way towards Samantha and other family members because she wanted to "cover up that she made up this narrative that she went from rags to riches", which he described as "nonsense".
He added that Meghan didn't realise "this would put an innocent person into the fray where all of a sudden she has hundreds of threats on her life coming at her, a stalker she had to deal with."
Addressing the court shortly afterwards, Meghan's lawyer Michael Kump branded Mr Tickin's comments as "inappropriate" and "quite frankly offensive to my client".
He said: "Don't make a federal case out of it."
The Telegraph reports he said: "Not every perceived slight ought to be litigated and that's true here. Plaintiff [Samantha] is taking issue with Meghan's own impressions of her own childhood growing up but that's not a proper subject matter for a court of law."
Mr Kump then argued that the "statements at issue here are not defamatory as a matter of law", as "the right to voice opinions and even criticise" are guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US constitution.
Should the case advance to the the next stage, Meghan and Harry will have to answer questions by Samantha's lawyers by July this year as part of a deposition.
However, the judge said she was “struggling” to see how Meghan could be accused of being the one responsible for publishing the allegedly defamatory statements, under Florida law.
The book in question, Finding Freedom, was written by Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand.
The Mail reports Mr Ticktin even admitted the case was "not the strongest case in the world" - but he hoped to make it stronger.
An attempt to prevent the deposition happening was put forward by Meghan and Harry's legal team in September, before being denied by a judge earlier this month.
Samantha Markle is related to the Duchess of Sussex through their father Thomas, and is the daughter of his ex-wife Roslyn Markle.
