Meghan Markle trial: High Court privacy case delayed until next autumn

The Duchess of Sussex’s privacy trial against the Mail on Sunday has been delayed by nine months to autumn 2021 after Meghan’s legal team gave “a confidential ground” for doing so.

The judge’s ruling comes after it was reported that Meghan was seeking to delay the January start of the trial in her privacy lawsuit against the newspaper over its publication of excerpts from a letter she wrote to her father.

Meghan’s request was considered by High Court Judge Mark Warby during an online hearing.

The news comes after Meghan lost her bid to prevent the Mail on Sunday from using the biography Finding Freedom in the legal battle.

In the latest stage of the process, Associated Newspapers sought permission to extend their defence on the basis that Meghan had “lost her rights to privacy in the contents of the letter” because “she and her husband cooperated with the authors” of Finding Freedom to put out “their version of events”.

A spokesperson for the couple has told The Independent on numerous occasions that they were not involved with the writing of Finding Freedom and that the book was based on interviews with anonymous sources conducted by co-authors Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand in addition to their own experiences in the royal household.

Meghan’s lawyers have previously said that accusations the couple “collaborated” with the authors was a “conspiracy theory” and argued that references to the letter in the book were simply “extracts from the letter lifted from the defendant’s own articles”.

In a preliminary hearing in August, Mr Justice Warby allowed the identities of five of Meghan’s friends, who spoke anonymously to People magazine about the Duchess, to remain protected. He added “for the time being, at least” that should be the case.

Meghan is suing Associated Newspapers, which denies the Duchess’s claims, for copyright infringement and breach of privacy.

According to court documents related to the case, as seen by the BBC, Meghan suffered “tremendous emotional distress” over the publication of her letter.

The papers state: “The Claimant had become the subject of a large number of false and damaging articles by the UK tabloid media, specifically by the Defendant, which caused tremendous emotional distress and damage to her mental health.”

In reference to interviews that five of the Duchess’s friends gave to People the documents add: “As her friends had never seen her in this state before, they were rightly concerned for her welfare, specifically, as she was pregnant, unprotected by the Institution, and prohibited from defending herself.”