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The Duchess of Sussex on Thursday won the final leg of her long-running data protection lawsuit against a newspaper publisher for publishing parts of a letter she wrote to her estranged father.
The London Court of Appeals upheld a High Court ruling in February that the publication of the letter former Meghan Markle wrote to her father Thomas Markle after she married Prince Harry in 2018 was illegal and violated her privacy.
The publisher of Mail on Sunday and the MailOnline website challenged that decision in the appeals court, which held a hearing last month. Senior Judge Geoffrey Vos dismissed the appeal, telling the court in a brief hearing Thursday that “the Duchess had a reasonable expectation of the privacy of the contents of the letter. This content was personal, private, and not of legitimate public interest. “
In a statement, Meghan, 40, said the verdict was “a victory not just for me but for anyone who’s ever been afraid to stand up for what’s right”.
“While this victory sets a precedent, most importantly we are now brave enough together to transform a tabloid that will make people cruel and benefit from the lies and pain they create,” she said.
Associated Newspapers denied Meghan’s claim that she did not intend to see the letter from anyone other than her father. They said the correspondence between Meghan and her then communications secretary Jason Knauf showed that the Duchess suspected that her father might pass the letter on to journalists and wrote it with that in mind.
The editor also argued that publishing the letter was part of Thomas Markle’s right to respond after an interview with five of Meghan’s friends on People magazine alleging that he had “cruelly killed his daughter in the run-up to her royal wedding.” cold shoulder ”.
However, Vos said the article, which the Mail on Sunday described as “sensational,” was circulated “as a new public revelation” rather than focusing on Thomas Markle’s reaction to negative media reports about him.
Associated Newspapers had also argued in their appeal that Meghan had made private information public by working with Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand, the authors of Finding Freedom, a sympathetic book about her and Harry.
The Duchess’s lawyers had previously denied that she or Harry collaborated with the writers. But Knauf said in court that he had given the authors information and discussed it with Harry and Meghan.
Knauf’s previously unpublished evidence was a dramatic turn in the longstanding case.
In response, Meghan apologized for misleading the court about the extent of her collaboration with the book’s authors.
The Duchess said she does not remember the conversations with Knauf when she testified earlier in the case, “and I apologize to the court for not having remembered those conversations at the time.”
“I had absolutely no desire or intention to mislead the accused or the court,” she said.
Meghan, a former star of the American TV legal drama “Suits”, married Harry, a grandson of Queen Elizabeth II, at Windsor Castle in May 2018.
Meghan and Harry announced in early 2020 that they would give up their royal duties and move to North America, citing the intolerable interference and racist attitudes of the British media. They settled in Santa Barbara, California with their two young children.
In her statement on Thursday, Meghan strongly condemned Associated Newspapers for treating the lawsuit as “a game without rules”. She said she had faced “deception, intimidation and calculated attacks” in the three years since the lawsuit began.
“The longer they drag on, the more they can twist facts and manipulate the public (even during the appeal itself), making a simple case extraordinarily tangled to get more headlines and sell more newspapers – a model the chaos is rewarded with truth. ”“ She said.
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