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The Duchess of Sussex won her privacy case in high court against the Mail on Sunday after a judge awarded a summary judgment in her favor over the newspaper’s publication of excerpts from a “personal and private” handwritten letter to her father, Thomas Markle.
In his view, Lord Justice Warby found Meghan in her claim for misuse of private information against Associated Newspapers Ltd, publishers of Mail on Sunday and Mail Online, more than five articles published in February 2019, which included excerpts from the letter.
He said: “It was, ultimately, a personal and private letter. Most of what was published was about the plaintiff’s own behavior, her feelings of distress over her father’s behavior, as she saw it, and the resulting rift between them. These are inherently private and personal matters.
“The claimant had a reasonable expectation that the content of the letter would remain private. The Mail articles interfered with that reasonable expectation. “
He added that “the only defensible justification for such interference was to correct some inaccuracies about the letter,” contained in a People magazine article that included an interview with five of Meghan’s friends, which made limited reference to the letter.
But Warby said the “inescapable conclusion” was that the disclosures in the published excerpts “were not a necessary or proportionate means to fulfill that purpose.”
He added: “For the most part, they didn’t serve that purpose at all. Taken as a whole, the disclosures were manifestly excessive and therefore illegal. “
Warby also found that the publication of the letter to Thomas Markle infringed on the Duchess’s copyright.
He said an electronic draft of the letter “would inevitably be seen as the product of sufficient intellectual creativity to make it original in the relevant sense and to confer copyright on its author or authors.”
He also found that the Mail on Sunday articles “copied a large and significant proportion of the original literary content of the work.”
Questions of whether Meghan was “the sole author”, or whether Jason Knauf, a former communications secretary to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, was a “co-author”, must be determined in court.
Meghan’s attorney had advocated a summary judgment in her favor alleging that ANL “had no prospects” to defend its claims for misuse of private information and alleged copyright infringement. They argued that his case was so strong that a trial was unnecessary on those parts of his claim.
The Duchess seeks compensation for alleged misuse of private information, copyright infringement and breach of the Data Protection Law on the five articles.
