This was a ploy being pursued in the British courts, at the time of writing, by the American actor Johnny Depp. As this book went to press it was not certain whether Mr Depp would legally clear his name as an alleged wife-beater, as he hoped. But he had undoubtedly had the chance to flood every variety of media on both sides of the Atlantic with his own point of view – and it had hardly harmed his DVD sales. Sunshine Sachs reckoned that Harry and Meghan were sitting on a much stronger grievance that they could lay out in a court of law – and the agency also knew that its two royal clients were burningly ardent to fight it.
Early in February that year, when Meghan was six months pregnant, the American celebrity magazine People had splashed a cover story – ‘Exclusive! The Truth About Meghan: Her Best Friends Break Their Silence.’ Upset by the ‘heart-breaking’ lies and ‘bullying’ aimed at Meghan by the British press, ‘her real friends’ had opened up ‘about the woman they know and love’.
Over seven lavishly illustrated pages – and speaking anonymously – five of Meghan’s very best buddies extolled her virtues, from her ability to rustle up ‘a five-star meal out of the garbage in your refrigerator’ to her ‘very close relationship with God’. Her nameless pals defended Meghan against the widespread media hostility in Britain, as well as the alleged behaviour of her father before the wedding – and these remarks about Thomas Markle opened the possibility of legal action.
The friends recounted the troubled history of Tom Markle’s pre-wedding mishaps and misadventures the previous May – as narrated in our own Chapter 21 – all set out from Meghan’s point of view. They also revealed that after the wedding she had written her father a letter that they had not read themselves but which, on the basis of what Meghan had told them, they characterised as being friendly and conciliatory: ‘She’s like “Dad, I’m so heart-broken. I love you. I have one father. Please stop victimizing me through the media so we can repair our relationship.”’
Reading the friends’ account of this apparently fence-building message, the Daily Mail’s Los Angeles editor Caroline Graham decided to travel to Mexico to visit Thomas Markle to see if he would show her the letter – which he did. In his eyes, Markle argued to Graham, the letter was anything but conciliatory. It had made no attempt to heal the rift with his daughter and had left him feeling ‘devastated’.
‘I thought it would be an olive branch,’ he said to Graham. ‘Instead, it was a dagger to the heart.’
Markle handed over the five pages of elegantly handwritten text to the Mail to publish, neither asking for, nor receiving, any payment – as the paper was at pains to make clear when it printed most of the letter’s contents in its edition of 10 February.
It is not for this author to discuss whether the crucial letter of August 2018 from Meghan to her father was an olive branch or a dagger. That question lies at the heart of the civil prosecution in the British High Court that Meghan Markle instituted against Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Mail, on 1 October 2019, through Schillings, her London libel lawyers, shortly before she left Africa with Harry.
One central issue on which Meghan is basing her case is that she retained personal copyright in the five pages she penned and sent to her father and that the Mail breached her copyright by publishing them. But some experts in publishing law say that the power of personal copyright is greatly diminished once a letter has been received, opened and read by its intended recipient. So, following this argument, Thomas Markle was quite entitled to cite the letter’s contents as evidence that Meghan had not been as conciliatory towards him as her friends maintained.
The truth of all this was scheduled to be fought out in court in London – should the case proceed – sometime in the summer of 2021, and Meghan and Harry naturally believe and hope that they will win. Their PR agency, however, does not seem to worry greatly if they lose, since the couple will have had ample chance to air to the world all the grievances and bitterness they have come to feel over many years against the British press.
Tom Bradby had noticed during the tour how ‘incredibly tired, even burnt-out’ Harry had appeared at times as the trip progressed. But then the press statement had been released in Johannesburg announcing Meghan’s legal action against Associated Newspapers – ‘alongside a more general attack on the tabloid press’ – and that seemed to change the mood.
It ‘was a shock,’ wrote Bradby, ‘but made sense.’
In conjunction with Harry’s two cases launched in the previous days against the Mirror and Murdoch groups, the young royal couple were now lined up directly against Britain’s three largest media groups – a formidable prospect as they headed back to London at the beginning of October 2019. Let battle commence!
25
Christmas Message
‘Prince Philip and I have been delighted to welcome our eighth great-grandchild into our family.’
(Queen Elizabeth II, 25 December 2019)
Windsors do not do campaigns of social upheaval. They do not do headline-grabbing lawsuits in pursuit of personal crusades. And, most of all, they do not air their grievances like any other Johnny Depp. To be royal, sometimes, is to ride the punches, to take it on the chin – and to just shut up.
At the end of a foreign tour it is normal practice for the member(s) of the family who have carried out the mission to pay a courtesy visit to Windsor Castle or Buckingham
