By Sheila Mckenzie-
The Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, (pictured)has won her high court privacy case against the Mail on Sunday, her victory as a “comprehensive win” over the newspaper’s “illegal and dehumanising practices”.
A judge concluded a summary judgment in Meghan’s favour over the newspaper’s publication of extracts of a “personal and private” handwritten letter to her estranged father, Thomas Markle.
In his judgment, Lord Justice Warby ruled in Meghan’s favour, in her claim for misuse of private information against Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Mail on Sunday (MoS) and Mail Online, over five articles in February 2019 that included extracts from the letter.
He said: “It was, in short, a personal and private letter. The majority of what was published was about the claimant’s own behaviour, her feelings of anguish about her father’s behaviour – as she saw it – and the resulting rift between them. These are inherently private and personal matters.
Taken as a whole, the disclosures were manifestly excessive and hence unlawful,” he added.
Warby addressed the copyright aspect of the litigation, by saying that an electronic draft of the letter “would inevitably be held to be the product of intellectual creativity sufficient to render it original in the relevant sense and to confer copyright on its author or authors”.
Justification
The judge said “the only tenable justification” for publication would be to correct some inaccuracies about the letter contained in an article in People magazine that had featured an interview with friends of Meghan.
He said it was legitimate for Markle and the defendant to use a part of the letter to rebut a false suggestion in the People article that the letter represented some form of “olive branch” from the duchess to her father.
However, he added that it was the “inescapable conclusion” that it was neither “necessary or proportionate” to disclose the rest of the information in the letter, he added.
Judge Warby also found that the MoS’s articles “copied a large and important proportion of the work’s original literary content”.
Sole Author Issue
The issue of whether Meghan was “the sole author”, or whether Jason Knauf, formerly communications secretary to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, was a “co-author”, should be determined at a trial, despite being something “of minor significance in the overall context”, the judge said.
In a statement, Meghan said: “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.
“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.
A spokesperson for Associated Newspapers 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.”