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Meghan lawyers ask judge to rule against Mail on Sunday without trial | Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex


A judge should rule in favour of the Duchess of Sussex without the need for a trial in her privacy case against the Mail on Sunday over publication of her letter to her estranged father because the newspaper had no real prospect of success, her lawyers told the high court.

Meghan, 39, is suing Associated Newspapers Ltd (ANL) after its newspaper and website Mail Online printed extracts from her handwritten letter to Thomas Markle, 76, sent in August 2018.

Her lawyers told the judge, Mr Justice Warby, the letter was a “heartfelt plea from an anguished daughter to her father” to stop talking to the press.

ANL’s lawyers argued the letter was written to “defend her against charges of being an uncaring or unloving” daughter, and she must have appreciated “that her father might choose to disclose it”.

The duchess is seeking damages for alleged misuse of private information, copyright infringement and breach of the Data Protection Act in relation to five articles, published in February 2019. Any trial would be postponed until the autumn after an application by Meghan was granted for reasons that have not been made public.

She is arguing for “summary judgment”, which would mean parts of the case being resolved without a trial.

At the start of a two-day remote hearing, Meghan’s lawyer, Justin Rushbrooke, said the publication “to millions of readers” of a private letter written to her father was a “plain and serious” breach of her rights of privacy.

It was a “triple-barrelled invasion of her privacy rights” in relation to correspondence, private and family life “all protected under domestic law”. ANL’s arguments “don’t stand up to scrutiny”, and its justification “fall short by some margin”, he said.

The case should be “struck out”, was “prolix, diffuse and lacking in clarity”, and a case of “smoke and mirrors”.

It raisedthe “disturbing question: who has the right of control over the contents of a private letter? Is it the writer of the letter, or the editor of the Mail on Sunday?” he asked.

“There can only be one answer to that question, and it’s the same whether the writer is a duchess or any other citizen. And the answer is, it is not the editor of the Mail on Sunday,” he said.

It was “utterly fanciful” for the Mail on Sunday to argue the duchess had “no reasonable expectation of privacy”.

“It is as good an example as one could find of a letter that any person of ordinary sensibilities would not want to be disclosed to third parties, let alone in a mass media publication, in a sensational context and to serve the commercial purposes of the newspaper,” he added.

The defence case, that Thomas Markle was left “with no choice but to go public” about the letter after its existence was revealed to US People magazine by an anonymous friend of the duchess, was “cynical and unattractive”, he said.

Antony White QC, representing ANL, said in written submissions that there were “significant factual matters which can, and should, be investigated at trial”.

They included questions over the “nature and extent” of the involvement of Kensington Palace in drafting the letter.

White said the duchess had made personal information public by cooperating with the authors of the biography Finding Freedom, a claim she denies. Her denial that she knew her friends were talking anonymously to People magazine “does not seem plausible”, he added.

Her case had “constantly shifted” with “confusing and tortuous” accounts of the genesis of the letter. The most “benevolent interpretation” was she was “not at all clear in relation to the letter what took place, when, or why”.

The case continues.



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