Prince Harry and his wife Meghan will be heard in a civil lawsuit filed in the United States by the half-sister of the Duchess of Sussex, the BBC reports.

Samantha Markle sued Meghan for “defamation and malicious misrepresentation” following the royal couple’s famous interview with TV host Oprah Winfrey in 2021.

The plaintiff claims she was defamed when Megan “falsely and maliciously stated” that she was raised as an “only child”.

A US judge has dismissed Megan’s request to stop testifying in the civil suit. A deposition is a formal statement of evidence in the United States that must be made by a witness or party to a legal proceeding before a court.

In this interview with host Oprah Winfrey, Harry and Meghan talk about their families, royal life and mental health.

The Duchess of Sussex’s half-sister claims in a complaint filed in March 2022 that Meghan made “evidentiary statements that were false and malicious” to an international audience. In this document, which was seen by the news agency PA News, Samantha Markle, who suffers from multiple sclerosis and moves around in a wheelchair, notes that the interview has been viewed by approximately 50 million people in 17 countries.

The complainant claims that the interview “spread false information and malicious lies” and exposed her to “global humiliation, shame and hatred”. She also says Meghan used the “powerful resources of the royal family’s PR operation” to spread “global lies” about Samantha Markle and their father Thomas Markle as part of a “deliberate campaign to destroy their reputation and credibility”. Samantha Markle says the operation was carried out to “preserve and promote the false story of Meghan’s rise from poverty to royalty”.

A lawsuit filed by the Duchess of Sussex to stop hearings in the trial was dismissed Tuesday by Florida judge Charlene Edwards Honeywell. According to The Times, a US judge believed that the decision on whether the two half-sisters had a “close” relationship was up to the jury.

The defamation lawsuit was filed shortly after Prince Harry published his memoir Spare in January, and after the Harry-Meghan couple appeared in the Netflix series late last year. (Source: Agerpres)