The Court of Appeal in London said that it would take time to rule on the privacy battle that was ongoing between Meghan, Duchess of Sussex and a tabloid paper, a case in which the royal apologised to the judges for making an incorrect statement.
The Mail newspaper, is attempting to nullify a judgement that it infringed on Meghan’s privacy and copyright by publishing excerpts from a letter that she wrote by hand, to her father Thomas Markle in August 2018, three months after she married Prince Harry, the grandson of Queen Elizabeth II.
It comes after high court judge Mark Warby ruled in Megan’s favour without a trial, earlier this year, ordering the newspaper to print a front-page apology and pay her legal bills.
‘We will take the usual amount of time to consider our judgments,’ senior judge Geoffrey Vos said on Thursday, the final day of a three-day hearing. He stated that the arguments would be examined ‘with great care’ by the judges.
During the hearings, Mail’s lawyers argued that Meghan, who is 40 years old, wrote the letter knowing that it would not be a private message to her father but would be made public.
During the previous trial, Meghan’s lawyers denied that possibility, as well as suggestions that she and Harry had contributed to a biography about the couple.
During the appeal, however, the Mail’s lawyers presented a witness statement from her former communications chief Jason Knauf, which they claimed called those accounts into question.
Knauf’s statement, as well as email and text message exchanges between him and the duchess, revealed that they had discussed providing some assistance to the biography’s authors.
‘I apologise to the court for my failure to recall these exchanges at the time. I had no desire or intention of misleading the defendant or the court,’ the duchess stated in a witness statement.
She added that the messages made her case stronger as they made no mention of showing the authors the letter.
Knauf also stated that the duchess indicated she was aware that the letter could be leaked and had ‘toiled over every detail that could be manipulated.’ She told the court she didn’t think that her father would make it public because it portrayed him negatively.
Meghan wrote the five-page letter to Markle after their relationship fell apart in the run-up to her wedding, which her father missed due to illness.
According to the newspaper, which published excerpts of the letter in February 2019, Markle intended for the letter to be made public in response to anonymous comments made by Meghan’s friends in interviews with the US magazine People.
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