So far, there haven’t been any major twists and turns in the first episodes of the Netflix documentary Harry and Meghan. Among the people who talked about the couple, well-known and expected faces: Serena Williams, Megan’s mother, Doria Ragland, close and true friends. However, the new entry that wowed fans is Ashley Hale, Markle’s granddaughter. who chose to speak out in favor of her aunt, despite the fact that her biological mother, Samantha Markle, the stepsister of the Duchess, always tried to interfere with their relationship.

Hale is the daughter of Samantha, with whom Meghan shares a father, Thomas Markle. Samantha was born from Thomas’ first marriage before he remarried to Doria Ragland and Megan was born. However, Hale, as she reveals in the documentary, was not raised by her mother. “Everyone agreed, including my brother and me, that we would be raised by our paternal grandparents.”She said: “They got custody of us when I was about two years old. And in the end they adopted us.” Hale says she only reunited with her biological mother “around 2007.” It was at this point that he also began to bond with his aunt Megan, whom she refers to as “Meg”.

Megan says she asked her father for her niece’s email address and wrote to her to reconnect. The two, four years apart, began to get to know each other and talk frequently. Then Megan invited Hale to go on vacation to New Orleans together.. “I think he plays a lot of different roles for me,” Ashley explained. Speaking about her connection with her aunt, “there is an element of sisterhood, there is something motherly, she is the best friend, it’s all together.”

However, their relationship over the years has not always been easy. “The media challenged Ash, just by association,” Megan says, “I didn’t want all this drama to affect her life.” In addition, Hale’s mother released several interviews attacking the Duchess, relations between Meghan and Samantha became tense, and Hale had to step aside. It was for this reason, according to Markle, that Ashley was not even invited to the royal wedding. “How can we justify the fact that we decided not to invite my half-sister to the wedding, but her daughter?”, explains the Duchess. For Ashley, however, it was not an easy blow to digest. “I felt,” she explains, “as if something had been taken away from me because of my mother. That was hard”.