Meghan Markle is celebrating a victory in court following her lengthy legal battle with the publishers of the Mail on Sunday. The Court of Appeal in London ruled in the Duchess of Sussex’s favor Thursday in her privacy and copyright infringement case against Associated Newspapers after they printed parts of a private letter she wrote to her father.
The case will not proceed to trial after the ruling, and Markle can expect to receive financial damages from the newspaper group as well as a public apology on the front page of the Mail on Sunday and the homepage of the Mail Online. “This is a victory not just for me, but for anyone who has ever felt scared to stand up for what’s right,” the royal said in a statement Thursday, as per PEOPLE. “While this win is precedent setting, what matters most is that we are now collectively brave enough to reshape a tabloid industry that conditions people to be cruel, and profits from the lies and pain that they create.”
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Markle said she had treated the lawsuit from day one as “an important measure of right versus wrong,” while the defendant treated it “as a game with no rules.” She continued, “The longer they dragged it out, the more they could twist facts and manipulate the public (even during the appeal itself), making a straightforward case extraordinarily convoluted in order to generate more headlines and sell more newspapers-a model that rewards chaos above truth. In the nearly three years since this began, I have been patient in the face of deception, intimidation, and calculated attacks.”
The latest court hearing comes after a three-day appeal hearing in November, which reassessed the summary judgment previously delivered in Markle’s favor in February, ruling that the Mail on Sunday had breached her privacy by reproducing parts of a handwritten letter she sent her father, Thomas Markle, in five articles published in February 2019. The ruling also stated that publishing the letter written ahead of her wedding to Prince Harry in 2018 infringed on Markle’s copyright.ย
The case will now return to the High Court for damages to be determined, but Thursday’s ruling marked the end of the more contentious part of the cast. “The courts have held the defendant to account, and my hope is that we all begin to do the same. Because as far removed as it may seem from your personal life, it’s not,” Markle concluded. “Tomorrow it could be you. These harmful practices don’t happen once in a blue moon-they are a daily fail that divide us, and we all deserve better.”
