Meghan’s court admission: I DID help book author
Lawyers reveal she fed information to counter her father’s claims in the media
MEGHAN Markle has admitted feeding information to the authors of the gushing royal biography Finding Freedom.
She authorised its writers to be secretly briefed, the London High Court was told.
Until now, Meghan has strenuously denied co-operating with the biography, which has been called ‘relentlessly flattering’.
She still insists neither she nor Prince Harry co-operated with or met the authors ‘for the purposes of the book’.
But in a new court filing made public yesterday, she revealed she allowed information to be passed to them via a third party. The document says she was concerned her father Thomas’s ‘narrative’ – that she had abandoned him and cut off contact – might be repeated.
The duchess admits that ‘accordingly’ she gave her own version of events to someone else to pass on to writers Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand, so that ‘the true position... could be communicated to t he authors to prevent any further misrepresentation’.
Meghan also claims that two senior members of the British royal family advised her to write the letter to her father that is at the centre of the court case.
She is suing The Mail on Sunday for publishing extracts from the handwritten note she sent to Thomas Markle after her May 2018 wedding to Harry. She now admits that she wrote the ‘private’ letter with help from Kensington Palace press office aide Jason Knauf.
He provided her with ‘ feedback’ and ‘ general ideas’, but she says he did not help with the ‘actual wording’ of the letter, which told Mr Markle he was breaking her heart ‘into a million pieces’. The duchess’s lawyers say she was distressed by media coverage about her father and ‘sought advice from two senior members of the royal family on how best to address the situation’.
The lawyers told the court in written submissions: ‘In accordance with the advice that she had received from the two members of the royal family, the [ duchess] decided... to write a private letter to her father in an attempt to get him to stop talking to the press. It was a private letter written and sent by the [duchess] to her father, on the advice of senior members of the royal family.’
The two royals were not identified. Meghan drafted the letter over several weeks in August 2018 on her iPhone, her lawyers said. She shared a draft ‘ with her husband and Mr Knauf for support, as this was a deeply painful process that they lived through with her’, her lawyers said.
Mr Knauf ran the Kensington Palace press office at the time. He was communications secretary to Prince William and his wife Kate, as well as Meghan and Harry. Meghan has denied using her friends as ‘de facto media relations agents’, but her lawyers added she ‘does not know if, and to what extent, the communications team were involved in providing information for the book’.
They said Mr Knauf was also responsible for telling senior royal courtiers about Meghan’s private l etter to her father because they had to be ‘kept apprised of any publicfacing issues’.
The Mail on Sunday is defendi ng i tself against Meghan’s court claims by arguing she allowed her friends to brief US magazine People and the Finding Freedom authors to produce ‘favourable’ versions of her life story, which the royal couple deny.
The newspaper claims the ‘relentlessly flattering’ biography of Meghan, 39, and Harry, 36, was written with the help of secret briefing by her friends on everything from her views on filming sex scenes to what she thought of Kate.
Finding Freedom was filled with secrets from friends to ensure the book was ‘favourable’ to her, it was said.
Documents l odged at the London High Court claim Meghan and Harry met the authors in 2018 to discuss ways of helping them to write the biography. The royal couple allegedly arranged for friends to pass on information that could have originated only from Harry or Meghan themselves.
Insights included a detailed account of their relationship, such as who said ‘I love you’ first, and the former Suits actress’s feelings on having to film a sex scene when she was beginning her screen career in 2008. The book also featured her views on a Suits love scene which had been uploaded to a pornographic website.
Meghan has strenuously denied all the newspaper’s claims.
Her l awyers said Finding Freedom was littered with errors, and therefore Meghan and Harry could not have been the authors’ sources.
Among the flaws and examples of ‘creative licence’, they said ‘the location of their first date, what they drank on the first date, what they talked about and the contents of their texts after the date are incorrect’.
A further passage in the book about Harry texting his father with news of the birth of son Archie in May last year was ‘plainly false... as [it] is widely known the Prince of Wales does not have a mobile phone’.
Meghan and her estranged father are set to face each other in the London High Court a year from now, if the trial goes ahead.
It was due to begin on January 11, but last month Meghan was granted a
‘Deeply painful process’
Father ‘could die tomorrow’
postponement – unopposed by The Mail on Sunday – for a ‘ confidential’ reason.
Her 76-year- old father has vowed to fly to London to give evidence against her, but says he wants his day in court sooner rather than later because he is in ill health and ‘ could die tomorrow’.
The newspaper’s case is that Mr Markle asked it to publish extracts from the letter, to set the record straight, because a few days earlier his daughter’s friends had revealed its existence – and mischaracterised it as a ‘loving’ letter – in the anonymous interview they granted People magazine.
Meghan has categorically denied to the court that she knew her five best friends were going to give the interview or mention the letter.
Judge Mark Warby said in a ruling published yesterday that Mr Markle’s ‘thoughts and feelings’ about the letter are a ‘relatively minor’ part of her privacy claim against the newspaper.