Meghan Markle is fighting to keep the identities of five of her friends anonymous amid her ongoing legal battle with Mail on Sunday.
Back in October, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex filed a lawsuit against The Mail On Sunday and their publishers, Associated Newspapers Limited, after the publication printed an excerpt of her personal letter to her estranged father, Thomas Markle.
Last week, court documents shed some light on the circumstances surrounding the interview the Duchess’ friends gave anonymously to People last year – along with claims that the Duchess was “unaware” of it and had nothing to do with it.
“Had the Claimant been asked or been given the opportunity to participate, she would have asked the KP Communications Team to say on the record that she had not been involved with the People magazine article, as she had not been,” the document read.
The documents went on to state that Kensington Palace’s position of silence with regards to the tabloid reports may have been what prompted her friends to do the interview with People. “It is probably because of this reason, as well as concerns about the press intrusion by the UK tabloids, that a few friends chose to participate, and they did so anonymously.”
New court documents filed show that Meghan’s lawyers are now applying to block Associated Newspapers from naming the five anonymous friends.
“Associated Newspapers, the owner of The Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday, is threatening to publish the names of five women—five private citizens—who made a choice on their own to speak anonymously with a U.S. media outlet more than a year ago, to defend me from the bullying behavior of Britain’s tabloid media,” the Duchess said in a witness statement submitted to the court.
“These five women are not on trial, and nor am I,” the statement continued. “The publisher of the Mail on Sunday is the one on trial. It is this publisher that acted unlawfully and is attempting to evade accountability; to create a circus and distract from the point of this case—that the Mail on Sunday unlawfully published my private letter.”
She notes that “Each of these women is a private citizen, young mother, and each has a basic right to privacy,” adding, “for the Mail on Sunday to expose them in the public domain for no reason other than clickbait and commercial gain is vicious and poses a threat to their emotional and mental wellbeing.”
“The Mail on Sunday is playing a media game with real lives,” the statement went on. “I respectfully ask the court to treat this legal matter with the sensitivity it deserves, and to prevent the publisher of the Mail on Sunday from breaking precedent and abusing the legal process by identifying these anonymous individuals – a privilege that these newspapers in fact rely upon to protect their own unnamed sources.”
A spokesman for the Mail on Sunday said: ‘To set the record straight, The Mail on Sunday had absolutely no intention of publishing the identities of the five friends this weekend.
“But their evidence is at the heart of the case and we see no reason why their identities should be kept secret.
“That is why we told the Duchess’s lawyers last week that the question of their confidentiality should be properly considered by the Court.”
