UK tabloid invaded Meghan Markle's privacy, judge says

In a striking legal victory for Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, in their bitter feud with the British tabloids, a High Court judge ruled on Thursday that one of them, The Mail on Sunday, had invaded Meghan’s privacy by publishing a private letter she had sent to her estranged father.

The judge, Mark Warby, ruled that Meghan, who is also known as the Duchess of Sussex, had “a reasonable expectation that the contents of the letter would remain private.” The disclosures from the letter, in articles published by The Mail, were “manifestly excessive and hence unlawful,” he added.

The summary judgment spares the duchess the prospect of testifying against her father in a messy public trial. But the judge ruled there would still be a trial to determine legal damages on a related claim of copyright violation.

At the heart of the case is an anguished, five-page letter that the duchess wrote to her father, Thomas Markle, a former Hollywood lighting designer, in August 2018, four months after he was a no-show at her wedding to Harry.

In the letter, she accused her father of breaking her heart into a “million pieces” by speaking to the tabloids about their estrangement while refusing to take her phone calls.

The Mail obtained the letter, presumably from Markle, and published it in February 2019. The tabloid’s owner, Associated Newspapers, contended that Markle had been under no legal obligation to keep the letter private and that the duchess, as a public figure, should not have expected it to remain confidential.

The duchess said in a statement, “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 dehumanizing practices.”

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She added: “The world needs reliable, fact-checked, high-quality news. What The Mail on Sunday and its partner publications do is the opposite.”

Harry and his wife have complained bitterly about their treatment by the tabloid press, both before and after their high-profile split with the British royal family last year. Harry, also known as the Duke of Sussex, has a separate lawsuit pending against the tabloids for allegedly hacking his cellphone.

The duke has been particularly incensed by coverage of his wife, which he has likened to the tabloids’ relentless pursuit of his mother, Princess Diana, which ended in her death after a high-speed car chase by photographers in Paris in 1997.

In April, after the couple moved to Los Angeles, they notified The Mail on Sunday and three other tabloids — The Sun, The Daily Mirror and The Daily Express — that they would no longer engage with them.

The couple remain a tabloid staple, even if coverage of them has been overshadowed in the last year by the coronavirus pandemic. Recent stories have speculated about whether Meghan would accompany Harry to Britain this summer for a series of celebrations, including the 100th birthday of his grandfather, Prince Philip (the consensus: No, because she does not want to be away from their son, Archie).

For a press corps that clearly misses covering the couple, the lawsuit generated fresh grist, not least about the troubled relationship between Meghan and her father.

Last month, Thomas Markle, 76, submitted a witness statement on behalf of Associated Newspapers, in which he said he decided to release extracts of his daughter’s letter to correct misperceptions about him in an article published by People magazine, which cast him in an unflattering light.

Meghan’s letter, he said, “actually signaled the end of our relationship, not a reconciliation.”

The litigation has not been without setbacks for Meghan. Last May, Warby struck out several elements of her case, ruling that The Mail would not be judged on whether it had acted dishonestly; had stirred up conflict between Meghan and her father; or had published offensive and intrusive articles about her.

Instead, he said, the case would hinge purely on whether the publication of the letter violated Meghan’s privacy.

While Warby found that it did, he said a trial would be needed to settle the question of whether she was the sole author of it or had a co-author: Jason Knauf, who was a communications adviser to the couple when they lived in Kensington Palace. That would allow him to claim some damages.

Warby’s 53-page judgment offers a vivid, at times unsavory, glimpse into the byzantine relations between the royal family and the press that covers them. But on the basic question of whether The Mail violated Meghan’s privacy, the judge was clear.

It was, he declared “a personal and private letter.”

“The majority of what was published,” the judgment continued, “was about the claimant’s own behavior, her feelings of anguish about her father’s behavior — as she saw it — and the resulting rift between them.”