Meghan Markle scored a stunning—and final—victory in her long running legal action against the publishers of the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday and Mail Online today, after a judge dismissed an appeal by publishers Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL) against her.
In a statement Meghan criticized the “harmful practices” of tabloids as “a daily fail that divide us.”
“This is a victory not just for me, but for anyone who has ever felt scared to stand up for what’s right,” she said.
Meghan called on people to be “collectively brave enough to reshape a tabloid industry that conditions people to be cruel, and profits from the lies and pain that they create.”
Meghan accused ANL of dragging the trial out and attempting to “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.”
Meghan added: “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.”
Meghan was suing ANL for invasion of privacy and violating her copyright after ANL published extensive sections of a “deeply personal” hand-written letter she sent to her estranged father Thomas Markle shortly after her wedding to Prince Harry.
Earlier this year, a senior judge, Lord Justice Warby, who is highly experienced in media law, granted Meghan a so-called “summary judgment.”
This meant that he had unilaterally decided there was absolutely no prospect of ANL succeeding in their attempt to defend themselves against Meghan’s action, and was therefore calling a halt to proceedings in Meghan’s favor, without proceeding to a full trial.
ANL was appealing this decision, saying that the case at least deserved to be tried in court.
However their argument was soundly rejected by the Court of Appeal today, despite the fact that ANL introduced dramatic new evidence: a witness statement from Meghan’s former communications chief Jason Knauf, showing that Meghan had briefed the authors of the book Finding Freedom, something she had long denied.
Meghan was forced to admit to the court that she had “forgotten” sending Knauf a lengthy email equipping him with specific briefing points for the authors, Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand.
However the presiding judge, Sir Geoffrey Vos, Master of the Rolls, said “This was, at best, an unfortunate lapse of memory on her part, but did not bear on the issues.”
Knauf also provided more damaging evidence against Meghan, including a set of messages from her, which stated that she had addressed the letter to “Daddy,” specifically so that if her father did leak it, it would “pull at the heart strings.”
ANL said this new evidence showed that Meghan had written the letter in consultation with her press office, and with the expectation it would leak, and that she therefore should have had a different expectation of privacy around it than another private letter.
However, Vos refuted this, saying the new evidence was “of little assistance” to the matter in hand.
ANL also argued that Meghan herself had caused the letter to be put in the public domain when five of her friends gave an interview to People magazine in which they mentioned the letter, characterizing it, ANL said, incorrectly.
ANL said they were merely offering Thomas Markle a right to reply and correct the record.
The judge blew this claim out of the water, saying that the publication was “not a justified or proportionate means of correcting inaccuracies about the letter contained in an article published on 6 February 2019 in People magazine. The key point was that the Mail on Sunday articles focused on revealing the contents of the letter, rather than providing Mr Markle’s response to the attack on him in People magazine.”
Vos added that the Mail’s headline: “Revealed: The letter showing true tragedy of Meghan’s rift with a father she says has ‘broken her heart into a million pieces’” clearly showed “that the Mail on Sunday articles were splashed as a new public revelation of extracts from the Duchess’s letter to her father, rather than her father’s answers to what People magazine had written.”
Meghan denied she had authorized the friends to speak to People or that she had intended the letter to leak, merely arguing that she understood it might and wanted to be prepared for that eventuality.
Vos concluded: “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 Associated Newspapers had done.”
Meghan’s thumping victory today will draw a final line under the case, and banishes the humiliating prospect of her being cross-examined in open court.