In a small bit of good news for Team Sussex, Meghan Markle has officially won her battle against The Mail over their invasion of her privacy in 2018.
The Duchess sued newspaper publisher Associated Newspapers Limited after the group’s tabloid publication, The Mail on Sunday, printed segments of a handwritten letter that she had sent to her backstabbing father, Thomas Markle, back in 2018.
Thomas Markle and the whole white side of Meghan’s family is a whole thing just on their own, but he has been at the epicenter of using the tabloids against his own daughter, feeding and perpetuating a vile form of harassment against the public figure that you’d think they would have outgrown.
According to CNN, the judge ruled in the case that “the disclosures were manifestly excessive and hence unlawful,” and that there would be “no prospect that a different judgment would be reached after a trial.”
Now Meghan won’t have to deal with seeing her father in open court to deal with all of this. In the letter, Meghan accused her father of breaking her heart into a “million pieces” by speaking to the tabloids about their estrangement while not taking phone calls with her in private. The only member of her family present at the Royal Wedding between her and Prince Harry was her mother, and she was walked down the aisle by Prince Charles, father of the groom.
The Mail on Sunday and Associated Newspapers previously made statements saying that they stood by the decision to publish excerpts from the letter. Clearly, the judge disagreed.
“She enjoyed a reasonable expectation that the contents would remain private and not be published to the world at large by a national newspaper; the defendant’s conduct in publishing the contents of the letter was a misuse of her private information,” Justice Mark Warby wrote.
Meghan spoke out following the judgement: “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.”
“We all lose when misinformation sells more than truth, when moral exploitation sells more than decency, and when companies create their business model to profit from people’s pain. But for today, with this comprehensive win on both privacy and copyright, we have all won.”
Despite the tabloid publication saying that Mr. Markle had been under no legal obligation to keep the letter private since his daughter is a public figure, and that she should not have expected it to remain confidential, that is a ridiculous statement to make considering that she is his daughter, but regardless of whether it was legal or not, it was cruel tabloid fodder that has now been smacked down.
(via The New York Times, image: Charles McQuillan/Getty Images)
Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!
—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—
