Friends who spoke out should not be named in privacy case, claims Meghan
MEGHAN Markle yesterday argued that the identities of five friends who spoke to a magazine to defend her should be kept a secret.
Meghan, 38, claims The Mail on Sunday is threatening to name the women who gave the bombshell anonymous interview to US magazine People.
In papers lodged at the UK high court, she said that each of the women is a ‘private citizen, young mother’ and accused the newspaper of playing a ‘media game’ with their lives.
But the newspaper insisted that it had ‘absolutely no intention’ of naming the women this weekend.
In a witness statement given to her lawyers yesterday, the duchess said her friends had spoken because they wanted to defend her. She said they ‘had made a choice on their own to speak anonymously with a US media outlet... to defend me from the bullying behaviour of Britain’s tabloid media’.
She told the court: ‘For The Mail on Sunday to expose them in the public domain for no reason other than clickbait and commercial gain is vicious and poses a threat to their emotional and mental wellbeing.’
Meghan, 38, is suing the newspaper’s publisher, Associated Newspapers, for breach of privacy, copyright and data protection rights. She launched legal action after it published extracts from a handwritten letter she sent to her father Thomas in August 2018.
In its defence to the breach of privacy claim, the newspaper said Meghan Markle had ‘knowingly’ allowed her friends to leak details of the same letter to People, effectively breaching her own privacy. The former actress admitted she told two friends about the letter, but denied she had authorised them to brief People magazine on her behalf.
Lawyers for the newspaper add that her estranged father only revealed the letter to correct a false impression given by her friends when they spoke to the magazine.
A spokesman for The Mail on Sunday said it ‘had absolutely no intention of publishing the identities of the five friends this weekend’. He added: ‘But their evidence is at the heart of the case and we see no reason why their identities should be kept secret... Their confidentiality should be properly considered by the court.’
In May, the judge in the case rejected part of the duchess’s claim that the paper had acted dishonestly and had stoked the rift with her father.