On September 21, the lawyers for the Daily Mail dragged the Duchess of Sussex’s lawyers to court for a hearing. The point of the hearing was that the Mail wanted to amend their defense. Meghan is suing the Mail because they published parts of her handwritten letter to her father, then wildly smeared her for those partial excerpts. She owns the copyright to her own letter. It should have been an open-and-shut case. But the Mail is dragging it out so the lawsuit will provide additional content for their negative coverage of the Sussexes.
Anyway, the Mail’s lawyers argued that they should be able to amend their defense because of Finding Freedom, the mostly positive book about the Sussexes featuring lots of insider-y information. The Mail’s lawyers argued that if Meghan provided some information to Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand, then the Mail is completely justified in printing Meghan’s letter to her father. Meghan’s lawyers argued that no, she wasn’t interviewed by Scobie and Durand and FF isn’t an authorized biography and Scobie & Durand got some stuff wrong. Well, the judge made a ruling on the situation – the Mail will get to use Finding Freedom as part of their defense.
Meghan, Britain’s Duchess of Sussex, has lost the latest skirmish in her privacy lawsuit against a tabloid newspaper, after London’s High Court ruled on Tuesday the paper could amend its case ahead of a trial next year.
Meghan, wife of Queen Elizabeth’s grandson Prince Harry, is suing publisher Associated Newspapers over articles the Mail on Sunday printed last year that included parts of a handwritten letter she sent to her estranged father, Thomas Markle, in August 2018.
Last week, the paper applied for permission to amend its case, arguing that the couple had cooperated with a biography about them which was published in August, and that showed Meghan had intended some private details to become public, including the contents of the letter.
The judge, Francesca Kaye, said that while she made no view on the strength of the Mail’s case, the amendments could not be said to be “unarguable or utterly fanciful”.
[From Reuters]
I’m starting to believe that the Daily Mail and their lawyers simply want to confuse everybody and throw enough sh-t at the wall that we forget that this case is really f–king simple? The Mail already argued that Meghan authorized the People Magazine cover story in early 2019, where the existence of the letter was revealed. The Mail said that Thomas Markle had no choice but to sell/give the letter to the Mail for publication because of that People story (which is asinine because the letter showed that he had been lying his ass off for months). And now they’re arguing that in retrospect, they were totally right to publish the letter because of Finding Freedom, a book which came out nearly a year and a half after their publication of the letter. And the judge is letting them do it. I can only hope that the Mail is “winning” all of these smaller battles but they’ll lose the war.
Photos courtesy of WENN.
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