Meghan Markle’s request to postpone her lawsuit against the Mail on Sunday and Associated Newspapers Ltd (ANL) has been approved by a High Court judge. The trial was set to begin on January 11, but now a new date is being set for the fall of 2021, as The Guardian reported.
Markle’s request was granted for a “confidential” reason. The decision was made in a private high court hearing on Thursday presided over by Justice Warby.
Her legal team has been working to get the whole trial dismissed. Markle has been granted permission to apply for a summary judgment, and if that resolves successfully, there would not be a trial. No ruling was made on Markle’s request for a summary judgment yet. That decision is expected to come in January.
Markle, 39, is suing ANL, the publisher of the Mail on Sunday and Mail Online , over five articles published in February. The articles in question included portions of a letter she wrote to her 76-year-old father in August 2018.
After the hearing, the judge said ANL did not oppose Markles’s application for postponement, although the publisher did state that her father’s health necessitates a new trial date as soon as possible.
“Thomas Markle is an elderly and sick man. He wants and intends to give evidence at the trial,” ANL’s lawyers told the judge.
As The Inquisitr reported, Markle lost her battle to prevent ANL using a recent biography, entitled Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family , as part of its defense. In a public hearing, her lawyers sought permission to overturn another judge’s previous ruling allowing ANL to amend its defense to include information in the biography by the authors Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand.
ANL has claimed Markle’s privacy couldn’t have been violated regarding the letter to her father “because she had knowingly caused or permitted information including the contents of the letter to be disclosed to authors of the book for publication.”
Jane Phillips, Markle’s representation, argued that the sections of the letter included in the book were limited to the sections published in the newspaper’s articles. She criticized ANL’s allegation that the couple had worked with the authors of the book to publish the letter.
She also described their defense as “not only a stab in the dark, but a stab in the dark in the wrong room” containing a “string of allegations” that were false.
The judge, however, was not persuaded.
ANL has denied the claims and stated that they would be moving forward with the case.
Since the original lawsuit was first filed, Markle and Prince Harry have stepped down as members of the royal family and moved to Santa Barbara, California, with their 1-year-old, Archie.
