The litigation is documented in the public record and has been reported on by multiple news outlets. What the litigation tells us, beyond its specific legal outcome, is something about the specific dynamics of a family where a daughter’s success had created financial dependencies and obligations that the relationships within the family had not been equipped to handle cleanly. The mother who had gone to prison, had had her infant daughter cared for by others, had been released and tried to rebuild something with her children, and had eventually moved with her daughter to New York and Los Angeles as the professional opportunity for that daughter expanded — this mother was now in an adversarial legal relationship with the actress her daughter had become.
Meester has not spoken in detail about the litigation in her public interviews. She has spoken about her mother with measured affection — “I can’t judge her on that” — and she has declined to provide the kind of narrative resolution to their relationship that would make it legible as a story about forgiveness or about ongoing damage. The relationship exists; what it is is not something she has made available for public consumption.
This is one of the most defensible choices a celebrity can make about their private life, and it is also one that runs against the tendency of the celebrity interview genre to resolve complicated family situations into something more emotionally tidy. The mother who was in prison when Leighton was born, who cared for her in a halfway house for three months, who eventually rebuilt a life alongside her daughter and then sued her in court — this is not a story with a clean arc. Meester has not tried to make it one.