Yahoo News Meghan Markle says she is ‘standing up for what’s right’ amid privacy battle with the Mail on Sunday
Meghan Markle said she is “standing up for what’s right” as she broke her silence over her High Court privacy battle with the Mail on Sunday.
The Duchess of Sussex said she had “won the case” after the newspaper’s publisher launched a challenge against the verdict at the Court of Appeal on Tuesday.
Speaking at the New York Times Dealbook online summit on Tuesday, Ms Markle said: “In terms of the appeal, I won the case, and this issue, frankly, has been going on when I had no children at all… I now have two children, as you know.
“So it’s an arduous process, but again it’s just me standing up for what’s right, which I think is important across the board, be it in this case or in the other things we’ve been talking about today.
“At a certain point, no matter how difficult it is, you know the difference between right and wrong, you must stand up for what’s right and that’s what I’m doing.”
Meghan, 40, sued Associated Newspaper Limited (ANL), over a series of articles which reproduced parts of a “personal and private” letter to her estranged father Thomas Markle in August 2018.
In a ruling earlier this year, Lord Justice Warby handed victory to Meghan by saying ANL had no viable defence to the legal claim, and publication of the letter was “manifestly excessive and hence unlawful”.
However, ANL has since launched a fresh challenge to the verdict at the Court of Appeal, arguing Mr Markle’s letter was “written with public consumption in mind as a possibility”.
Andrew Caldecott QC, for ANL, told the Court the newspaper group believes new evidence from her former communications secretary Jason Knauf will cast doubt on whether the letter was actually “private”.
Elsewhere in the online summit, the Duchess of Sussex spoke out about the dangers of “clickbait culture”.
She attacked social media platforms and media outlets for creating a “race to the bottom” and urged governments to “be brave” and regulate them.
Meghan said: “Clickbait culture, is about creating the news rather than reporting the news. The damage is impossible to quantify.
“If you are getting paid for hateclicks, then you’re perpetuating a cycle.”
She also took aim at tabloid newspapers, claiming reading them was “toxic for your mental health”.
“I would urge you not to read tabloids,” she told the New York Times’ Andrew Sorin. “I don’t think that’s healthy for you.”
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