Meghan: ‘Liberating’ away from the crown
Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex has described to Oprah Winfrey how “liberating” it was to have a conversation – let alone a sitdown interview – with the television host without royal minders.
“CBS This Morning” aired a clip on Friday of Winfrey speaking to Meghan about a conversation they had before the actor’s wedding to Prince Harry in May 2018.
The clip opens with Winfrey describing how she asked for an interview and Meghan recounting how there were others in the room and she wasn’t even supposed to be speaking with Winfrey.
“As an adult who lived a really independent life to then go into this construct that is, um … different than I think what people imagine it to be, it’s really liberating to be able to have the right and the privilege in some ways to be able to say yes,” Meghan tells Winfrey.
Winfrey’s interview with Meghan and Harry is set to air Sunday night in the United States on CBS and will air in Britain on Monday evening.
Despite stepping back from royal duties a year ago and moving to California, there still intense interest in the couple and their relationship with the royal family.
When Meghan was asked what was right about doing the interview now, she said it was because of the couple’s newfound freedom.
“That we’re on the other side of a lot of, a lot of life experience that’s happened,” Meghan said. And also that we have the ability to make our own choices in a way that I couldn’t have said yes to you then. That wasn’t my choice to make.”
Also Friday, a British judge ordered the Mail on Sunday to publish a front-page statement highlighting the Duchess of Sussex’s legal victory over the newspaper for breaching her copyright by publishing parts of a letter she wrote to her estranged father.
High Court justice Mark Warby said Friday that publisher Associated Newspapers must run the statement with letter size no smaller than its February 2019 frontpage headline about “Meghan’s shattering letter to her father.”
He said the publisher also must run the statement on the MailOnline website for a week, with a link to his earlier judgment in the case.
The former Meghan Markle, 39, sued the publisher for invasion of privacy and copyright infringement over five February 2019 articles that reproduced large portions of a letter she wrote to her father, Thomas Markle, after her marriage to Prince Harry in 2018.
The judge ruled last month that the publisher had misused the duchess’s private information and infringed her copyright. He said the duchess “had a reasonable expectation that the contents of the letter would remain private,” and concluded the paper’s publication of large chunks of it was “manifestly excessive and hence unlawful.”
Associated Newspapers says it plans to appeal.