Meghan Markle says palace told her not to invite her niece to the royal wedding

• Meghan had a “painful” talk with her niece.
• Ashleigh Hale and Meghan are close, but she wasn’t invited to the wedding.

Meghan Markle is being honest about a “painful” talk she had with her niece before she got married to Prince Harry.

In the new Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex says that she is close with Samantha Markle’s daughter, Ashleigh Hale, but not with her half-sister Samantha Markle. But making the list of guests for the couple’s royal wedding in 2018 was hard.

“How do we explain that this half-sister isn’t invited to the wedding, but that the half-sister’s daughter is?” said Meghan, 41. “With Ashleigh, the guidance at the time was to not have her come to our wedding,” the Duchess of Sussex continued.

“I was in the car with H. I had her on speakerphone and we talked her through what guidance we were given and why this assessment was made … and that’s painful.” “I think I said I was hurt on some level, but I understood where it was coming from,” Ashleigh said.

“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, who is an immigration lawyer, said that her paternal grandparents raised her and her brother. She thinks of them as her parents. She hadn’t seen Samantha, who is now 58, since she was 6 years old until 2007.

That’s also when Meghan reached out to her niece. According to Ashleigh, their relationship began with “these long emails back and forth.” “Then there were texts and phone calls. After a while, I think we talked on some level a few times a week.”

Their relationship even extended to traveling together, with a trip to New Orleans. “We walked around, we listened to some good live music, ate way too much food and had way too many drinks,” Ashleigh recalled. “It was just the two of us, which I think was really special. I think she takes on a lot of roles for me. There’s, like, a sister element. There’s something maternal. She’s a best friend. She’s, you know, kind of all the things.”

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