Meghan Markle’s feelings don’t care about your facts

Did Meghan Markle grow up as an only child? She said she did, in that famously awful Oprah interview. Yet Samantha Markle, her half-sister, has taken her to court over the claim. She argues that Meghan made her feel ‘humiliation, shame and hatred on a worldwide scale.’

Rather than defending the veracity of their client’s assertion, the Duchess of Sussex’s lawyers have chosen instead to say that Meghan’s claim was ‘obviously not meant to be a statement of objective fact’. In other words, duh, people – Meghan knows she has two half-siblings, Samantha and Thomas. No, her remark was, according to her lawyers, ‘a textbook example of a subjective statement about how a person feels about her childhood’.

Well, there is something objectively hilarious about that use of ‘textbook’. Haven’t you read all those textbooks in which people claim to be only children when they aren’t? The official statements of the Duke and Duchess often deploy this torturously sub-Freudian lingo – as if not really written for public consumption, let alone clarity, but for two pairs of eyes in particular.