The Duchess of Sussex has lost the first round in her legal fight with Associated Newspapers over alleged breached of privacy after the Mail on Sunday and Mail Online published excerpts from private correspondence between her and her estranged father, Thomas Markle.
On Friday, 1 May, Mr Justice Warby ruled against the Duchess and her husband, Prince Harry, who had claimed the newspaper had acted dishonestly.
The judge ruled it was "irrelevant" and added: “Such issues are assessed objectively. The claimant’s arguments that motive and state of mind are among the circumstances to be considered are contrary to Campbell v MGN Ltd (the legal precedent involving supermodel Naomi Campbell).”
The Duchess, who was born Meghan Markle and made her name as an actress in her native United States, was outraged when the Mail on Sunday published an article in February 2019 under the headline: “Revealed, the letter showing true tragedy of Meghan’s rift with a father she says has ‘broken her heart into a million pieces’.”
The Duchess, 38, is seeking compensation under Article 82 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and section 168 of the Data Protection Act 2018.
At a hearing on 24 April Associated Newspapers' lawyer, Anthony White QC, had asked the judge to dismiss two aspects of the Duchess's claim - that the newspaper had acted with "dishonesty" and "malice" in the way it had edited the excerpts and that the publication of the letter excerpts should be considered in the light of nine other articles which were "generally unfavourable to the defendant as one of those tabloid newspapers which had been deliberately seeking to dig or stir up issues between her and her father."
But Mr Justice Warby said that by considering the nine allegedly false articles which the Duchess relied upon, there was a danger of the case "descending, unnecessarily, into 'uncontrolled and wide-ranging investigations akin to public inquiries'."
He added: "As a matter of principle, other articles or other conduct can in principle be relied on as 'rubbing salt in the wound', but that cannot be and is not said of these nine articles. The claimant’s case is that the articles sued upon are a distressing instance of a pattern of misconduct which also includes the nine other articles that have been sued upon."
In his ruling Mr Justice Warby said: "Counsel for the claimant (the Duchess) has compared this case and the claim made by Prince Charles against the Mail on Sunday in 2008 over the publication of extracts from his travel journals, when the court granted the Prince summary judgment. Counsel submits that the private and confidential nature of the information in the letter is obvious and self-evident, and publication served no public interest, but rather the sole purpose of satisfying a curiosity about the claimant’s private life which the defendant itself had generated amongst its readership."