Palace press officer ‘helped Meghan write THAT letter to dad’
As legal storm rages over feud with father, duchess insists she ‘created’ note she sent him after wedding
THE Duchess of Sussex’s ‘private’ letter to her father was written with the help of the Kensington Palace press office, the High Court has been told.
Meghan is suing The Mail on Sunday for publishing extracts from the note, which she says breached her privacy.
She also claims the paper infringed her copyright in the handwritten letter, sent to her father Thomas Markle after he was unable to attend the 2018 royal wedding.
But the newspaper’s lawyers have told the court that the ‘ personal’ letter was drafted with the help of palace officials.
Jason Knauf, who was Communications Secretary to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, ‘and/or others in the Kensington Palace communications team contributed to the writing of the letter,’ they told the High Court.
As a result, the note was not Meghan’s ‘own intellectual creation’, the paper’s lawyers said in court filings made public yesterday. It also emerged that Meghan recently amended her original court claim to reword a sentence which said she ‘wrote’ a private and confidential letter to her father. It now says, instead, that she ‘created’ it, ‘using her own intellectual creativity’.
The letter is at the centre of the duchess’ high- stakes privacy battle against The Mail on Sunday, the Daily Mail’s sister paper. Meghan’s friends previously claimed that the note was an attempt to heal relations with her father. The newspaper says it was nothing of the sort, and was aimed at ‘admonishing’ Mr Markle.
Her lawyers have revealed to the High Court that she produced an early draft on her i Phone’s ‘ Notes’ app before writing out the final version by hand.
They said: ‘The [duchess] created the letter over a period of several weeks in August 2018 on the Notes application in her iPhone.’
She then copied out the draft from her iPhone ‘by hand, making a number of minor modifications, so as to create the letter’.
Meghan and her estranged father are set to face each other in the High Court a year from now if the trial goes ahead.
The trial was due to begin on January 11, but last month Meghan won a nine- month delay after asking Mr Justice Warby for a postponement 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 an anonymous interview they granted US magazine People.
Meghan has categorically denied to the court that she knew her five best friends were going to give an interview about her to one of the world’s biggest publications, or mention the letter.
The Mail on Sunday maintains Meghan wrote the letter knowing it was likely to be made public.
It has previously cited the ‘immaculate’ handwriting used by the former Suits star, in support of its case that she expected others to read it. Now it says she enlisted the palace’s top communications aide to help her write it.
The next stage in the dramatic case will come later this week, when a deadline expires for Meghan to give her ‘reply’ to claims she cooperated with the authors of royal biography Finding Freedom.
The newspaper says the flattering book is evidence Meghan and Harry colluded with writers Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand to produce a version of events favourable to them, which the royal couple deny. The duchess tried to argue that Finding Freedom had no place in her privacy trial, but so far two senior judges have ruled against her.
She missed a deadline to file her reply to the claims about colluding with its authors, on October 21, but Mr Justice Warby gave her more time, until last Friday. But it was extended again and she now has until tomorrow afternoon.
Harry, 36, and Meghan, 39, stepped down as senior working royals in March and have relocated to California with 18-month- old son Archie.