LONDON (AP) — A British judge ruled Wednesday that the Duchess of Sussex can keep the names of five close friends secret while she brings a privacy invasion lawsuit against a British newspaper.
High Court judge Mark Warby said “I have concluded that, for the time being at least, the court should grant the claimant the order that she seeks,” protecting the anonymity of friends who defended Meghan Markle in the pages of a U.S. magazine.
Meghan is suing Associated Newspapers Ltd., the publisher of the Mail on Sunday and the MailOnline website, over five articles that published portions of a handwritten letter she wrote to her estranged father, Thomas Markle, after her marriage to Prince Harry in 2018.
Meghan, 39, is seeking damages for alleged misuse of private information, copyright infringement and data protection breaches.
The duchess asked the judge to prohibit publishing details of female friends who spoke anonymously to People magazine to condemn the alleged bullying she had received from the media. She argued that the friends were not parties to the case and had a “basic right to privacy.”
Associated Newspapers, which is contesting the claim, says it was Meghan’s friends who brought the letter into the public domain by describing it in the People article. One told the magazine that the duchess had written: “Dad, I’m so heartbroken. I love you. I have one father. Please stop victimizing me through the media so we can repair our relationship.”
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The publisher’s lawyers argue that the information about the letter disclosed in the article must have come “directly or indirectly” from Meghan.
Associated Newspapers’ attorney Antony White said during a court hearing last week that keeping the friends’ names secret “would be a heavy curtailment of the media’s and the defendant’s entitlement to report this case and the public’s right to know about it.”
But Meghan’s attorney, Justin Rusbrooke, argued that the duchess was unaware her friends were speaking to the magazine. They say the anonymous interviews were arranged by one of the five friends, who was concerned about the toll media criticism was taking on the duchess, pregnant at the time with her first child.
Rushbrooke argued that the court had a duty to “protect the identity of confidential journalistic sources.”
The women’s names are included in a confidential court document, but they have been identified in public only as A to E.
No date has been set for the full trial of the duchess’s invasion of privacy claim.
Meghan is seeking damages for alleged misuse of private information, copyright infringement and data protection breaches