Meghan Markle’s father says he is willing to give evidence against her in defamation case launched by half-sister Samantha who is suing Duchess over her ‘rags to royalty’__Check

The defamation claim was lodged in Florida last week and sees Samantha, 57, suing the Duchess of Sussex for $75,000 (£57,000) – claiming her sister ‘lied’ in her interview special with Oprah Winfrey in March last year and also in details given to the authors of her biography Finding Freedom.

In the interview, the 40-year-old duchess said she had spent little time with her half-sister while growing up and had not seen her in ’18 or 19 years’.

And when asked by Winfrey about Samantha’s ‘tell-all’ book, ‘The Diary of Princess Pushy’s Sister’, the duchess said: ‘I think it would be hard to tell all when you don’t know me.

‘I don’t feel comfortable talking about people that I really don’t know. I grew up as an only child, which everyone who grew up around me knows.’

In November, Meghan Markle apologised to the Court of Appeal after failing to remember she told a royal aide to brief the authors of her Finding Freedom biography, Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand.

The Mail on Sunday had sought to defend itself against Meghan’s claims that it unlawfully breached her privacy by publishing extracts of a letter to her father Thomas Markle, which appeared in the book.

The Duchess of Sussex, who previously insisted she and Prince Harry did not co-operate with the two writers of the book, said she had ‘forgotten’ providing the aide details of what to reveal ‘when you sit down with them’.

The messages, revealed by the duchess’s former communications secretary Jason Knauf, showed she sent information about her half-siblings Samantha and brother Thomas Jr for the book. But she said: ‘I had absolutely no wish or intention to mislead the defendant or the court.’ The paper lost its appeal the following month.