Palace conflict laid bare
The Duchess of Sussex was left ‘‘undefended by the institution’’ while pregnant and a member of the British royal family, her legal team have said, as they claim her wedding brought £1 billion in tourism to the United Kingdom.
The duchess, who is suing The Mail on Sunday over the publication of parts of a letter she wrote to her father, has said she was ‘‘prohibited from defending herself" against false stories while at the palace, with her friends left frustrated and ‘‘silenced’’.
Lawyers for Meghan Markle, who have submitted new paperwork to support her privacy claim against the newspaper, have laid out her version of events surrounding an interview given by five of her close friends to People magazine in 2019 in an attempt to defend her. In doing so, they spell out her frustrations with the palace’s approach to the media, as well as correcting what they claim are inaccuracies in reporting about the lives of Meghan and husband Prince Harry.
The extraordinary submissions confirm the conflict between the palace and the duchess’s approach to the press on record for the first time, stating that the institution’s policy of ‘‘no comment’’ to media stories was deployed ‘‘without any discussion with or approval by the Claimant’’.
In one section, about the level of ‘‘wealth and privilege’’ the couple enjoyed in Britain, the duchess’s team say their public funding was ‘‘relatively nominal’’, with costs for the May 2018 wedding met by the Prince of Wales, and security paid only for the protection of crowds.
‘‘This contribution of public funds towards crowd security was far outweighed by the tourism revenue of over one billion pounds sterling that was generated from the royal wedding . . . which went directly into the public purse,’’ they say. They did not quote a source for the figure.
The court case, in which The Mail on Sunday is accused of breaching the duchess’s privacy, copyright and data protection, sees her deny that she authorised her friends to speak to People or reveal the existence of the letter she wrote to Thomas Markle.
Claiming the duchess had endured ‘‘hundreds of thousands of inaccurate articles about her’’, her legal team say she was left with ‘‘tremendous emotional distress and damage to her mental health’’.
At the time of the article in 2019, papers state, there was a ‘‘shared frustration’’ among her friends at Kensington Palace’s ‘‘no comment’’ response.
As a result, they say, five friends – named in confidential paperwork and referred to only as ‘‘A, B, C, D and E’’ – gave details of the duchess’s life, feelings and letter to her father to the American celebrity magazine without her knowledge. The Mail on Sunday subsequently printed parts of the letter, given to them by Thomas Markle.
The duchess filed a claim against The Mail on Sunday in October. She lost the first strike-out hearing, which ruled that she would not be allowed to argue in court that the newspaper acted dishonestly, ‘‘stirred up’’ issues with her father, and had an ‘‘agenda’’ against her. No date has been set for the full trial.
– Telegraph Group