LONDON (Reuters) – A London judge should rule in favour of Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, without the need for a trial in her privacy case against a tabloid newspaper because the publication has no prospect of winning, the British royal’s lawyers said on Tuesday.
Meghan, 39, the wife of Queen Elizabeth’s grandson Prince Harry, is suing Associated Newspapers after its Mail on Sunday printed extracts of a handwritten letter she sent to her estranged father Thomas Markle in August 2018.
She says the publication of the letter was a misuse of private information and breached her copyright, and is seeking aggravated damages.
The paper has argued the duchess was willing for other private matters to become public if it suited her interests, and it was justified in publishing parts of the letter in response to interviews her anonymous friends had given to the U.S. magazine People.
At a two-day hearing starting at London’s High Court, Meghan’s lawyers said judge Mark Warby should give a summary judgement in favour of the former U.S. actress.
“There is no real prospect of the defendant establishing that the claimant had no {reasonable expectation of privacy) in relation to the contents of the letter; and the defendant’s contentions to the contrary are utterly fanciful,” her lawyers said in documents submitted to the court.
They said the decision to publish the letter was an assault on “her private life, her family life and her correspondence”, describing the paper’s defence as “prolix, diffuse and lacking in clarity”.
“It is, in truth, a case of smoke and mirrors, an attempt to distract attention away from the only facts which matter, in particular that this is a complaint about the unauthorised publication, for commercial gain, of the contents of a quintessentially private letter,” they said.
The trial was due to start last week but was delayed until late 2021 because of a “confidential” reason.
(Reporting by Michael Holden; editing by William James)
