Pregnant Meghan Markle Was ‘Unprotected’ By Royal Family Against Tabloids: Lawsuit
Meghan Markle was left “unprotected” by the royal family during her pregnancy and unable to defend herself from “hundreds of thousands of inaccurate articles” due to the palace’s media policy, her legal team argues in new court documents obtained by HuffPost on Wednesday.
The revelations are part of the Duchess of Sussex’s ongoing lawsuit with Associated Newspapers Limited, which owns the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday.
The case, which concerns issues of privacy, copyright infringement and the breach of the Data Protection Act 2018, centres on the Mail on Sunday’s publication of excerpts of a private letter that Meghan wrote to her father, Thomas Markle, in August 2018.
Associated Newspapers argues that its publication of the personal letter on February 9, 2019 was justified, given that one of Meghan’s unnamed friends’ spoke of the letter’s existence in a People magazine feature published three days earlier.
The new documents, which show the extreme steps the duchess took to keep the letter from being intercepted by others, state that Meghan didn’t know it would be “revealed or referred to by any media outlet” as she “would not have consented to this.”
Meghan’s legal defence also denies that the duchess knew of the existence of the interview with her friends or that she instructed them to intervene on her behalf. Instead, her lawyers say the Duchess of Sussex found out about the People magazine story on the day that it was published.
The Duchess of Sussex’s legal team says that Meghan was aware, however, in January 2019, while she was pregnant, that her friends “were extremely worried about her mental health and the impact which the false portrayal of her in the media was having on her and that they wanted to correct this.”
Meghan “had become the subject of a large number of false and damaging articles by the UK tabloid media,” the documents say, calling out Associated Newspapers Limited for articles that reportedly...
