This story has been updated since it was originally posted on April 3, 2022.
Seems like Meghan Markle’s Oprah interview might have been more trouble than it was worth. As well as currently being sued for defamation by her half-sister Samantha Markle for allegedly lying about her rags to royalty life in the interview, the Duchess of Sussex has now found herself at the center of another scandal—this time, involving her passport!
In the infamous Oprah interview, which aired in March 2021, the Duchess claimed that she was forced to hand over her passport to the royal family when she started dating Prince Harry. “When I joined that family, that was the last time, until we came here, that I saw my passport, my driver’s licence, my keys. All that gets turned over. I didn’t see any of that anymore,” Meghan told Oprah at the time. However, a report published by The Sun has suggested that that wasn’t the case, as she had allegedly been on a total of 13 holidays as a tourist before she and Prince Harry stepped down as senior royals back in January 2020. Wow!
"It is understood from royal sources that Meghan's passport had to be kept safe to ensure it did not fall into the wrong hands," the report stated. "But it would still have been used by her for her holidays." Meghan is said to have visited Italy, Holland, Botswana, Ibiza, the US, and Canada, to name just a few, after she and Prince Harry started dating, in addition to the places the couple visited on official royal tours. The Queen is the only member of the royal family who doesn’t need a passport to travel.
"Of course the royal family would want to keep Meghan’s passport safe," royal author Margaret Holder told The Sun, following Meghan's comments in the interview. "But it’s unthinkable she didn’t carry it for personal and private trips such as her New York baby shower, traveling to see friends in Canada, partying in Amsterdam, and going to Lake Como with George Clooney."
This story was updated on August 1, 2022 with the information below.
And it seems like Meghan's interview with Oprah is gaining attention yet again. According to a recent article by Fox News, "Meghan Markle denied this week that she lied to Oprah Winfrey about being an 'only child' in her tell-all interview last year." The outlet adds, "The Duchess of Sussex’s legal team said in a court filing Monday in connection to her half-sister Samantha Markle’s defamation lawsuit that Meghan made a 'subjective' statement about how she felt about her childhood."
Fox News reports that her legal team notes, "Meghan’s response to that question that she 'grew up as an only child' was obviously not meant to be a statement of objective fact that she had no genetic siblings or half-sibling. Rather, it was a textbook example of a subjective statement about how a person feels about her childhood."
The report also stated that Samantha Markle filed a lawsuit against her sister in March for $75,000, claiming Meghan's statement that she "grew up as an only child" was "defamatory because Meghan made her half-sister look like an 'opportunist of the worst kind' who wanted to cash in on having a famous relative."
As a response, Michael Kump, Meghan's attorney, told TMZ, "This baseless and absurd lawsuit is just a continuation of a pattern of disturbing behavior. We will give it the minimum attention necessary, which is all it deserves.”
