Ashleigh is Samantha Markle/Grant’s daughter. Samantha lost custody of Ashleigh when Ashleigh was very young, and she was raised by her paternal grandparents. Ashleigh is Meghan's niece.
"In the new Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex shared that while she was not close to her half-sister Samantha Markle, she had a close bond with Samantha’s daughter, Ashleigh Hale. However, things got tricky when it came to the guest list for the couple’s royal wedding in 2018.
“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. 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, an immigration attorney, said she and her brother were raised by their paternal grandparents, whom she considers her parents. She had not seen Samantha, 58, since she was 6 until they reconnected in 2007. That was also when Meghan reached out to her niece — a relationship that started with “these long emails back to each other,” Ashleigh recalled. “And then texts and calls. After a while, I think we were talking, on some level, several days a week.”
Meghan said that she believes she and Ashleigh “craved the same thing,” explaining, “I wanted a sister, and she was like a little sister. Ash was put through quite a bit by the media, just by association. And I didn’t want her life to be plagued with all that drama.”
Added Ashleigh of the time when Meghan’s relationship with Harry, 38, became public, “After the news first broke, Samantha pretty quickly began expressing a lot of angry words about Meg towards me. What was communicated to me was maybe some resentment. And it felt like no matter what I said, her perspective didn’t change and seemed to get angrier and bigger, and we stopped talking. Some people you just can’t reason with.”"
people.com/royals/meghan-markle-could-not-invite-niece-royal-wedding-ashleigh-hale-netflix-docuseries/