Meghan Markle Accuses ‘Mail on Sunday’ of a “Vicious” Attempt to Reveal Her Friends’ Identities for “Clickbait”
Meghan Markle has written a witness statement accusing the Mail on Sunday of a “vicious” attempt to name five friends who anonymously spoke to People back in 2019.
Meghan Markle has accused the Mail on Sunday of attempting to name five anonymous friends who gave an interview about her in People in 2019, calling the move “vicious” and saying it could damage her friends’ mental health for “clickbait.”
Meghan’s lawyers have applied to block Associated Newspaper from naming the friends, and a witness statement was submitted to the court by Meghan. In a copy obtained by The Telegraph, the duchess accuses the Mail on Sunday of trying to “expose them in the public domain for no reason other than clickbait and commercial gain,” adding that the move “poses a threat to their emotional and mental well-being.”
“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,” her statement reads. “These five women are not on trial, and nor am I. 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.”
Meghan continues, writing that “each of these women is a private citizen, young mother, and each has a basic right to privacy. Both the Mail on Sunday and the court system have their names on a confidential schedule, but 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 well-being. The Mail on Sunday is playing a media game with real lives. 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.”
As a reminder, Meghan is suing the Mail on Sunday over a private letter it published from the duchess to her father, Thomas Markle.
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