Meghan Markle Defeat: Prince Harry and Wife Face Disastrous Setback, Can They Recover?
Meghan Markle has suffered a big blow. Her legal battle with the British press is now likely to result in a big loss. A High Court judge has dismissed as irrelevant, several huge parts of her ongoing case against Mail on Sunday.
The part where she claims the media is malicious and has an agenda against her has also been thrown out.
While the case is far from over, this is a major setback. Mr. Justice Warby also struck out her accusations that journalists were dishonest and were the main reason why she and her estranged father Thomas suffered an even bigger rift. According to Markle, the journalists were keen to dig up dirt so that she would be portrayed in a negative light, but the court determines that this is irrelevant to the case.
The Duchess of Sussex has specifically filed a case against Associated Newspapers, Mail on Sunday's parent company for publishing an article where parts of her handwritten note to her father was published. However, Associated Newspapers has applied to have three major pars of her claim thrown out in an online hearing.
Now, Mr. Justice Warby already ruled entirely in Associated Newspapers' favor. Warby said, "I do not consider the allegations in question go to the heart of the case."
In the judgment, he said that all passages attacked in the application notice were struck out. Some of them were "irrelevant to the purpose for which they are pleaded," while some are removed because there were insufficient details. The judge claims his actions were to ensure the case is only confined to what is "reasonably necessary and proportionate" to the goal of achieving justice for the parties involved.
Britain's top lawyers have, in last week's hearing, said that this was quite possibly. They claimed that Meghan's case was overblown in the first place and needed to be cut back.
With this judgment, any trial from now on will focus only on the conversation as to whether Meghan should have a reasonable expectation of privacy with regard to the contents of her private letter to her father. She can be at the losing end because, as some legal experts would argue, her friends already briefed People Magazine about the letter's contents.
The case would also assess if the publication's act of putting out parts of the letter were in the public interest and legal under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which talks of freedom of expression.
For her part, Markle has already insisted that her so-called friends who leaked the letter's contents to People magazine did so without her knowledge at all.
Markle may already be in LA with husband Prince Harry, but it does not appear that she is getting a new life that she so craved when Megxit was decided. Apart from this pending case and now this huge setback, her actions in LA are always scrutinized. Most of the writeups about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in LA during this covid-19 crisis had been negative, with reports claiming Harry is now regretting going away with his wife.
READ MORE: Meghan Markle and Prince Harry Associating with A 'Dangerous Wacko'?
