General

Privacy Case: Meghan Markle gets ‘comprehensive win’ against Mail on Sunday

Published

February 11, 2021

The Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, has won her privacy case against the Mail on Sunday a two-year legal battle.

Lord Justice Warby ruled in favour of the Duchess over the newspaper’s publication of extracts of a “personal and private” handwritten letter to her estranged father, Thomas Markle.

Meghan had sued Associated Newspapers (ANL) – the publishers of the Mail on Sunday (MoS) and Mail Online for misuse of private information of over five articles in February 2019 that included extracts from the letter.

Meghan, 39, sent the handwritten letter to her father, Thomas Markle, in August 2018, following her marriage to Prince Harry in May that year, which Mr Markle did not attend. The couple are now living in the US with their son Archie, after having stepped back from their roles in the Royal Family.

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Extracts from the letter appeared in a double-page page spread in the Mail on Sunday, alongside the headline: “Revealed: the letter showing true tragedy of Meghan’s rift with a father she says has ‘broken her heart into a million pieces'”.

In a statement released on Thursday, Merkle described her victory as a “comprehensive win” over the newspaper’s “illegal and dehumanising practices”.

“After two long years of pursuing litigation, I am grateful to the courts for holding Associated Newspapers and the Mail on Sunday to account for their illegal and dehumanising practices.

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“These tactics – and those of their sister publications Mail Online and the Daily Mail – are not new … For these outlets, it’s a game. For me and so many others, it’s real life, real relationships and very real sadness. The damage they have done and continue to do runs deep.

“The world needs reliable, fact-checked, high-quality news. What the Mail on Sunday and its partner publications do is the opposite. We all lose when misinformation sells more than truth, when moral exploitation sells more than decency, and when companies create their business model to profit from people’s pain.

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“But, for today, with this comprehensive win on both privacy and copyright, we have all won.”

A spokesman for ANL said: “We are very surprised by today’s summary judgment and disappointed at being denied the chance to have all the evidence heard and tested in open court at a full trial.

“We are carefully considering the judgment’s contents and will decide in due course whether to lodge an appeal.”

(The Guardian UK/BBC)