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Meghan Markle’s father Thomas said he believed his daughter had ‘expressly authorized’ or at least ‘approved’ an article in People magazine about him that was “a total lie”, and which portrayed him as “dishonest, exploitative, publicity-seeking, callous and ruthless”.
Thomas, whose explosive testimony was contained in an unsealed witness statement today at the High Court in London, said a controversial letter written to him by his daughter in August 2018, four months after missing his marriage to Prince Harry due to a heart attack was a “criticism” of him which he said “marked the end of our relationship”.
Meghan is looking for a so-called ‘summary judgment’ in her high-profile privacy and copyright (ANL) action, triggered by the 2019 publication in the Mail on Sunday sections of the letter she sent to her estranged father.
If successful, a summary judgment in Meghan’s favor would end much of the case without a full trial. Buckingham Palace is believed to want Meghan to find a way to avoid being the first senior royal in living memory to undergo a grueling and potentially embarrassing cross-examination of her personal life on the witness stand.
In the statement, released today to the High Court, Thomas, who is the featured witness for Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), the editors of the Mail on Sunday, said he felt “vilified” in the article by People, in which five anonymous friends of Meghan sat down with the post for interviews. Some friends have mentioned the letter.
Markle said in her statement: “The article misrepresented the contents of the letter and my response and vilified me by claiming that I was dishonest, exploitative, publicity-seeking, indifferent and heartless, leaving a devastated devastated and devastated girl. I had to defend myself against this attack.
ANL claims Meghan allowed her friends to give briefings People on the content of the letter, thus placing it in the public domain. ANL says this allowed them to post extracts from the letter, with Thomas’ consent, to correct the case on his behalf. Meghan rejects this interpretation of events and has denied hosting a friends briefing on her behalf.
The identity of the five friends is protected by the court.
In his witness statement, Thomas, 76, said Meghan’s handwritten correspondence made no attempt at reconciliation. He said the letter didn’t even ask how he was doing after the heart attack, which he suffered before his daughter’s wedding in May 2018, which prevented him from attending the nuptials.
Thomas said his decision to allow the newspaper to publish parts of the letter was prompted by the article in People magazine.
“It was a total lie. It distorted the tone and content of the letter Meg wrote to me in August 2018. I quickly decided I wanted to correct this false statement.“
– Thomas markle
“I was shocked by what he said about me,” he said in the witness’s statement. “It was a total lie. It distorted the tone and content of the letter Meg had written to me in August 2018. I quickly decided that I wanted to correct this false statement.
“It seemed to me that the article had either been expressly authorized by Meg, or at the very least had known and approved of its publication,” The temperature reported.
Meghan, 39, sues Associated Newspapers, the publisher of Mail on Sunday and MailOnline, on a series of articles reproducing parts of the handwritten letter sent to Mr Markle in August 2018.
She seeks damages for alleged misuse of private information, copyright infringement and data protection law violation on five articles, published in February 2019, which included excerpts from the “private and confidential ”to his father.
He said, “It was a criticism of me. The letter didn’t say she loved me. He didn’t even ask me how I was. It didn’t show any concern that I had suffered a heart attack and didn’t ask about my health. It actually marked the end of our relationship, not a reconciliation.
Meghan said for her part that she suffered an “assault” on her private and family life when the Mail on Sunday published the letter she had written to her father.
The Daily Beast reported earlier that Meghan’s lawyers said she had put herself “in an unsupervised and potentially vulnerable position” when writing to her father, and never intended to return the letter public.
Meghan also doubled down on her claims that she had not cooperated with Find freedom authors Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand.
Scobie “confirmed in his witness statement that neither he nor his co-author has met or questioned the claimant or her husband for the book,” indicates the legal argument submitted to the court by Meghan’s sides.
ANL argued the letter had unusual status as it was written, they claimed, with the help of a senior Kensington Palace press secretary.
Antony White QC for ANL said: “No truly private letter from daughter to father would require input from the Kensington Palace communications team.
White argued that there is “a real possibility that the Claimant also fails to establish that she was the sole author within the meaning of copyright” because of the involvement of Jason Knauf, former secretary of communications from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, in writing the letter.
However, Meghan’s team claim that she is the sole author of the letter, claiming that she spent many hours composing the letter on her iPhone and simply shared a draft “with her husband and Mr. Knauf to get her support because it was a deeply painful process they had gone through with her, and because Mr. Knauf was responsible for keeping senior officials in the Royal Household informed of any issues the public faced – with the media spectacle surrounding Mr. Markle being one such issue. Mr. Knauf provided comments on the e-draft in the form of ‘general ideas’ as opposed to actual wording. “
“This is also a good example one could find of a letter that anyone of ordinary sensitivity would not want to be disclosed to third parties, let alone in a mass media publication …“
– Justin Rushbrooke QC
Justin Rushbrooke QC, also representing the Duchess, described the handwritten letter as “a heartfelt appeal from a distressed daughter to her father”, which Meghan sent to Markle “to her home in Mexico via a trusted contact … for reduce the risk of interception. “
He said that “the contents and character of the letter were inherently private, personal and sensitive”, and Meghan therefore “had a reasonable expectation of confidentiality with respect to the contents of the letter”.
Rushbrooke added in his written submissions: “This is as good an example as one could find of a letter that anyone of ordinary sensitivity would not want to be disclosed to third parties, let alone in a mass media publication. , in a sensational setting and to serve the newspaper’s business purposes. “
He said the decision to publish the letter was an assault on “his privacy, family life and correspondence,” in documents submitted ahead of the hearing.
Meghan’s team, described as ‘utterly fanciful’, say Meghan did not view the letter as completely private.
The full trial of the Duchess’s complaint was due to be heard in the High Court this month, but last year the case was adjourned to fall 2021 for confidential reasons.
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