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Meghan Markle wins privacy case appeal against Mail on Sunday
Meghan issued a triumphant statement on Thursday morning after the Court of Appeal ruled in her favour upholding the High Court judge’s decision over her privacy case. However, the defendant in the case and publisher of the MailOnline and Mail on Sunday, Associated Newspapers, announced in a statement it is considering an appeal to the British Supreme Court. The statement read: “We are very disappointed by the decision of the Court of Appeal.
“It is our strong view that judgment should be given only on the basis of evidence tested at trial, and not on a summary basis in a heavily contested case, before even disclosure of documents.
“No evidence has been tested in cross-examination, as it should be, especially when Mr Knauf’s evidence raises issues as to the duchess’s credibility.
“After People magazine published an attack on Mr Markle, based on false briefings from the duchess’s friends wrongly describing the letter as a loving letter, it was important to show that the letter was no such thing.
“Both the letter and People magazine also seriously misrepresented the reasons for Mr Markle’s non-attendance at the royal wedding.
“The articles corrected these matters and raised other issues of public interest including the reasons for the breakdown in the relationship between the duchess and her father.
“We are considering an appeal to the Supreme Court in the United Kingdom.”
Meghan Markle may be facing another appeal over her privacy case (Image: GETTY)
Meghan Markle on the stage of Global Citizen live in September (Image: GETTY)
This statement mentioned Jason Knauf, who was Meghan’s communications secretary between 2018 and 2019.
Mr Knauf was heard in November by the Court of Appeal through a written witness statement in which he claimed Meghan had written the letter to her estranged father Thomas Markle Snr in August 2018 with the understanding that it could be leaked.
He said she had sent him an early draft of the letter and had written: “Obviously everything I have drafted is with the understanding that it could be leaked so I have been meticulous in my word choice, but please do let me know if anything stands out for you as a liability.”
Among other claims made by Mr Knauf in his statement, the former royal communications secretary detailed by sharing a text exchange with the Duchess how Meghan chose to call her father “Daddy” in her letter as she had “only ever called him” in this manner and “in the unfortunate event that it leaked it would pull at the heartstrings”.
Moreover, Mr Knauf said Meghan had “deliberately ended each page part way through a sentence so that no page could be falsely presented as the end of the letter”.
In her statement to the Court of Appeal, Meghan stressed she did not think her father would leak her letter as it would have shown him in a “bad light”.
Denying she thought it likely her letter would enter the public sphere, she said she “merely recognised that this was a possibility”.
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Meghan Markle depicted during a royal engagement in 2019 (Image: GETTY)
The Duchess also said: “The proposition that saying that I recognised that it was possible that my father would leak the letter, albeit unlikely, is the same as saying that I thought it likely that he would do so is, I would suggest, absurd.”
The Duchess said the text exchange showed she went to “considerable lengths to ensure that the letter only went to my father”.
The Associated Newspapers’ statement also mentioned a People article, referring to a story published by the US magazine in early 2019 in which five friends of Meghan anonymously defended the Duchess and spoke about her father.
The MailOnline and Mail On Sunday later published, in February 2019, extracts from the Duchess’ “private and personal” letter to Mr Markle over five articles.
A few months later, in October 2019, Prince Harry announced in a statement his wife the Duchess of Sussex had decided to sue Associated Newspaper, the publisher also of the Daily Mail.
Meghan claimed the Associated Newspapers’ articles containing her letter misused her private information, infringed her copyright and breached the Data Protection Act.
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Meghan Markle issued a strongly-worded statement following the Court of Appeal’s ruling (Image: GETTY)
In February, High Court judge Lord Justice Warby gave summary judgement, which meant the case did not go to full trial, and ruled in Meghan’s favour.
Lord Justice Warby said the publication of these extracts had been “manifestly excessive and hence unlawful”.
Giving his ruling, the judge said the majority of the content published was about Meghan’s “behaviour, her feelings of anguish about her father’s behaviour, as she saw it, and the resulting rift between them”.
He added: “These are inherently private and personal matters.”
A three-day hearing took place at the Court of Appeal in November after Associated Newspapers challenged this ruling.
Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are no longer senior royals (Image: GETTY)
However, on Thursday morning, judges Sir Geoffrey Vos, Dame Victoria Sharp and Lord Justice Bean dismissed the publisher’s appeal in a ruling.
The letter, the judges said, was “personal, private and not matters of legitimate public interest.”
Reading a summary of their decision, Sir Geoffrey said: “It was hard to see what evidence could have been adduced at trial that would have altered the situation.
“The judge had been in as good a position as any trial judge to look at the article in People magazine, the letter and The Mail On Sunday articles to decide if publication of the contents of the letter was appropriate to rebut the allegations against Mr Markle.
“The judge had correctly decided that, whilst it might have been proportionate to publish a very small part of the letter for that purpose, it was not necessary to publish half the contents of the letter as ANL had done.”
The royals’ family tree (Image: EXPRESS)
During this hearing, the judges were told 585 out of the letter’s 1,250 words had been republished in the five articles in question.
Meghan issued a strongly-worded statement in the wake of this ruling, saying: “This is a victory not just for me, but for anyone who has ever felt scared to stand up for what’s right.
“While this win is precedent setting, what matters most is that we are now collectively brave enough to reshape a tabloid industry that conditions people to be cruel, and profits from the lies and pain that they create.
“From day one, I have treated this lawsuit as an important measure of right versus wrong.
“The defendant has treated it as a game with no rules. The longer they dragged it out, the more they could twist facts and manipulate the public (even during the appeal itself), making a straightforward case extraordinarily convoluted in order to generate more headlines and sell more newspapers – a model that rewards chaos above truth.
A High Court judge ruled in Meghan’s favour in February (Image: GETTY)
“In the nearly three years since this began, I have been patient in the face of deception, intimidation and calculated attacks.
“Today, the courts ruled in my favour – again. – cementing that The Mail on Sunday, owned by Lord Jonathan Rothermere, has broken the law.
“The courts have held the defendant to account, and my hope is that we all begin to do the same.
“Because as far removed as it may seem from your personal life, it’s not. Tomorrow it could be you.
“These harmful practices don’t happen once in a blue moon – they are a daily fail that divide us, and we all deserve better.”
