Meghan Markle (aka the Duchess of Sussex) has won a privacy lawsuit against the publishers of the Mail on Sunday for printing excerpts of a handwritten letter she sent her estranged father.
In a decision published Thursday, Lord Justice Warby ruled that Associated Newspapers Limited, the parent company of Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mail, clearly violated Meghan's privacy by printing the letter, calling the disclosures, "manifestly excessive and hence unlawful."
"There is no prospect that a different judgment would be reached after a trial," he said.
In the lawsuit, filed Oct. 1, 2019, Meghan sued Associated Newspapers for misuse of private information, infringement of copyright, and breach of the Data Protection Act 2018 after extracts from a private letter she composed and sent to her father Thomas Markle were published in a series of stories in the Mail on Sunday and Mail Online in Feb. 2019.
In a statement, Meghan said she was grateful to the courts "for holding Associated Newspapers and The Mail on Sunday to account for their illegal and dehumanizing practices" after “two long years of pursuing litigation."
"These tactics (and those of their sister publications MailOnline and the Daily Mail) are not new; in fact, they’ve been going on for far too long without consequence. For these outlets, it’s a game. For me and so many others, it’s real life, real relationships, and very real sadness. The damage they have done and continue to do runs deep," she said.
“The world needs reliable, fact-checked, high-quality news. What The Mail on Sunday and its partner publications do is the opposite. We all lose when misinformation sells more than truth, when moral exploitation sells more than decency, and when companies create their business model to profit from people’s pain. But for today, with this comprehensive win on both privacy and copyright, we have all won. We now know, and hope it creates legal precedent, that you cannot take somebody’s privacy and exploit it in a privacy case, as the defendant has blatantly done over the past two years.
“I share this victory with each of you—because we all deserve justice and truth, and we all deserve better."
BuzzFeed News has reached out to a spokesperson for the Mail on Sunday for comment.