Traditionally, when a celebrity wins a big legal victory, they emerge, drained, onto the steps of the court, and say (quite accurately) that it has been a terrible ordeal that never should have happened. Then they say they are looking forward to putting the events of the previous months and years behind them. They may or may not punch the air. It’s optional. Then a dash to a waiting car, and home.
One imagines Meghan Markle punched the air on Thursday when she heard that she had been handed down an almost completely comprehensive victory by London’s High Court in her courageous privacy and copyright infringement action against the Mail on Sunday. No, she wouldn’t have to face her father on the witness stand. No, she wouldn’t have to explain how come Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family was so uncannily accurate.
But that was where Meghan and tradition—never the most natural of bedfellows—parted company, with Meghan instead issuing a statement that made it very clear that her hatred, contempt and disgust of the tabloid press remains undimmed, and that she considers her fight with the entire tabloid culture very far from over.
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Even for those of us who have spent several years observing Meghan Markle’s no-bullshit, do-it-my way determination, the aggrieved and disgusted tone of this victory statement was notable. It’s worth taking it, in full, from the top:
“After two long years of pursuing litigation, I am grateful to the courts for holding Associated Newspapers and The Mail on Sunday to account for their illegal and dehumanizing practices. 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.
“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.
“I particularly want to thank my husband, mom, and legal team, and especially Jenny Afia for her unrelenting support throughout this process.”
The anger and grievance in the first two paragraphs of this statement is extraordinary. Meghan is like a street fighter who has knocked her opponent down and been declared the winner, but is far from finished with their opponent. It bodes ill for the prospect of any comprehensive reset in relations between the Sussexes and the British tabloid media.
There is, of course, no reason Meghan should be inclined to grace. Associated Newspapers behaved despicably, and, we now know, illegally, by publishing a letter to her dad (who comes out of the judgement as deeply manipulative and self-serving) that was very clearly private. As the judge noted, it would be “fanciful”—to use his rather wonderfully florid term—to suggest her missive was somehow intended for public consumption.
But what is the longer term game plan? One has to assume that for Meghan and Harry, it is simply a continuation of their policy of “zero engagement” with the British tabloids which they believe deliberately distort the truth about them to sell papers. This policy, while flawed, at least has the advantage of consistency.
But not feeding the beast will not weaken it enough to kill it. The idea that Meghan can shut up the critical, bawdy, fearless, irreverent (and yes, all too often inaccurate) British media seems, well, fanciful.
Thursday’s verdict is a huge and significant victory for Meghan and Harry. But the tone of Meghan’s statement is also openly aggressive, suggesting this is only a battle in a larger war; she and Harry want to make papers like the Mail on Sunday and Daily Mail examples of the kind of corrosive journalism they see as prevalent.
From the beginning, those close to Meghan represented this to me as a battle that she was taking on, because she could afford to, on behalf of innocent victims made into tabloid fodder by the relentless maw of the media. That idea is very much present in Meghan’s declaration that she “shares” the victory with “each of you,” even though some legal scholars were quick to speculate that the ruling could benefit powerful individuals seeking to crush media reports based on leaked documents.
Meghan and Harry are happy to cooperate with the “good” media, the one that doesn’t distort their message, as they see it.
But there is an undeniable tension between Meghan’s stated commitment to “fact-checked, high quality news” and her and Harry’s habit of only appearing on curated podcasts, or only being interviewed by very small outlets, where the power balance is absurdly one-sided and they are simply not challenged as they make their points. Or simply being interviewed by those journalists they consider sympathetic. That is not journalism; it is sycophantic PR.
Harry and Meghan don’t really need the media. They’d be quite happy bypassing the media and going direct to their fans on Twitter and Instagram (even though social media comes in for regular bashings from them, most recently by Harry in his rant in Fast Company about how social media caused the Capitol riot).
The trouble is, the British media really, really do need them, although it’s an unrequited love, of course, and whether this ruling changes how they write about them remains to be seen.
Ultimately where are Harry and Meghan? In one more iteration of the endless battle to control the media. But Meghan’s furious statement makes it quite plain that she has a clear-eyed understanding that there’s no compelling reason to think it is a battle that will ever stop.
“Fuck with us and we’ll sue you,” the statement, and their actions, say.
At significant risk to their reputation, sanity, stress levels and bank balance, Harry and Meghan did what generations of royals have longed to do, and vocally. Few editors will rush to print anything actionably rude about Harry or Meghan henceforth without the strongest of evidence.
For the next few years, at least.
