LONDON – In an important legal victory for Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, in their bitter rivalry with the British tabloids, a Supreme Court judge ruled on Thursday that The Mail on Sunday invaded Meghan’s privacy by publishing a private letter that she had sent to her father.
The judge, Mark Warby, ruled that Meghan, also known as Duchess of Sussex, had “a reasonable expectation that the letter’s content would remain private”. He added: “Mail articles interfered with this reasonable expectation.”
At the heart of the case is a distressed five-page letter that the duchess wrote to her father, Thomas Markle, a former Hollywood lighting designer, in August 2018, four months after he failed to attend her wedding to the prince. Harry.
In the letter, she accused her father of breaking his heart into “a million pieces”, telling the tabloids about his departure, while refusing to answer his calls.
Mail obtained the letter, presumably from Mr. Markle, and published it in February 2019. The tabloid owner, Associated Newspapers, argued that Mr. Markle had no legal obligation to keep the letter private and that the Duchess, as a public figure, I shouldn’t have expected it to remain confidential.
The decision spares the Duchess of Sussex from the prospect of testifying against her father. But the judge ruled that she still had to go to trial on the issue of copyright infringement.