UK royal Meghan’s privacy action against tabloid has first court hearing

LONDON: The first court hearing in a privacy case brought by Meghan, Britain’s Duchess of Sussex, against a tabloid newspaper for printing part of a letter to her father began at London’s High Court on Friday.

Meghan, wife of Queen Elizabeth’s grandson Prince Harry, is suing publisher Associated Newspapers over articles its Mail on Sunday newspaper printed in February last year that were based on a letter she had sent to her father, Thomas Markle.

Lawyers for the duchess say its publication was a misuse of private information and breached her copyright. They are seeking aggravated damages from the paper.

Given Britain’s coronavirus lockdown, Friday’s hearing was held by video, which the judge, Mark Warby, said was a relatively new way of conducting such cases.“It’s not a trial, there will be no witnesses and I’m not going to make any findings of fact about the underlying events,” Warby said. The hearing is one of the first stages in the legal action and a date for a full trial has not yet been set.

Meghan and Harry, who are living in the Los Angeles area having stepped down from their royal roles at the end of last month, are expected to listen in remotely to part of the hearing, a source said.

The lawyer for the newspaper, Antony White, sought on Friday to have parts of Meghan’s claim struck out, arguing they were irrelevant or impermissible, not properly pleaded or disproportionate for the court to investigate.The case centres on articles published in February 2019 about the rift between Meghan and her father who fell out after her glitzy, pomp-laden wedding to Harry in May the year before.