Meghan gets a 9-month trial delay over ‘secret’
MEGHAN Markle was yesterday granted a nine-month delay to her privacy trial – despite her sick father warning: ‘I could die tomorrow’.
The Duchess of Sussex asked for the postponement for a ‘confidential’ reason.
The High Court sat in private session to hear her secret, and afterwards Mr Justice Warby said in public that he agreed to the trial – due to start on January 11 – being put off until October or November next year.
The Mail on Sunday, which Meghan is suing, made clear it did not oppose her application to postpone the case on the basis of her confidential reason.
But it also asked the judge to consider her father’s health.
The court was told Thomas Markle is ‘elderly and sick’ and wants his ‘day in court’ sooner rather than later.
The case is about a handwritten letter Meghan sent him after her royal wedding in 2018. She accuses the newspaper – the sister paper of the Daily Mail – of breaching her privacy by publishing extracts from it.
Yesterday the court heard Mr Markle believes his 39- year- old daughter should not be pursuing the case and is determined to fly to London to give evidence against her. But he said he had heart and lung problems and does ‘not know what the position will be’ if there was a postponement of a few months.
He said: ‘This case is causi ng me anxiety and I want to get it over with as quickly as possible.
‘I am a realist and I could die tomorrow. The sooner this case takes place the better.’
Mr Markle’s comments were revealed in a statement by Liz Hartley, group editorial legal director of Associated Newspapers, which publishes the Mail on Sunday. He gave his permission for her to share his remarks with the court. He was not told Meghan’s secret.
In her statement, Miss Hartley told the judge she spoke to Meghan’s father by phone last week to inform him the duchess was seeking an adjournment to the case.
She said: ‘ For the avoidance of doubt, I did not disclose any confidential information to him concerning the [duchess’s] reasons for seeking an adjournment.’
The newspaper’s case is that Mr Markle only decided to publicise the letter after it had been revealed – and mischaracterised as ‘loving’ – by Meghan’s friends, who gave an anonymous interview to US magazine People in February 2019.
Miss Hartley said: ‘Mr Markle came to our journalist, Caroline Graham, because he considered that he had a right to tell his side of the story following publication of what he considered to be a misleading article in People magazine.
‘He continues to feel that he has been misrepresented and that the [duchess] should not be pursuing this claim.
‘He is anxious that he should have his day in court so that he can tell the truth in public, have his evidence tested under cross-examination and defend himself against the suggestion that he breached [his daughter’s] privacy without any reasonable justification. Despite his state of health, Mr Markle was and is planning to travel to London to give evidence in person.’
She added: ‘I can confirm that his intention to give evidence is as firm as it has always been.’
Meghan’s confidential information was said by t he judge to be the ‘primary’ reason for the duchess wanting the trial delayed. It will now not be held until at least October 15 next year.
But the judge threw out other applications by the duchess, one of which was a bid to appeal against a ruling allowing the newspaper to rely on gushing royal biography Finding Freedom.
Meghan’s side argued this was unfair. The newspaper says the book is evidence Meghan and Prince Harry colluded with the authors to produce a version of events favourable to them – which the couple deny.
Another j udge ruled the biography could be brought into the case, and refused the duchess permission to appeal. Yesterday she asked the trial judge to be allowed to appeal against that decision. Mr Justice Warby refused.
The court also heard Meghan had failed to meet an October 21 deadline to set out her ‘reply’ to the claims that she colluded with Finding Freedom’s authors. By failing to do so, she is ‘guilty of noncompliance with an order of the court’, the newspaper’s lawyer Antony White said.
The judge rejected an application by Meghan’s lawyers to effectively pause the case and said she now had to file the document by November 13.
Meghan i s also trying to have the whole of the newspaper’s defence case thrown out. She has applied for a ‘summary judgment or strike out’ – which would see the case resolved in her favour by the judge without a full trial. She would not have to take the witness stand or face her father in court.
Mr Justice Warby said he would consider arguments for and against this application over three days in January.
‘Have his day in court’