A Judge Granted Meghan Markle’s Request To Keep The Names Of Her Friends Private

August 5, 2020 / Posted by:

The five friends of Meghan Markle (an unproduced Lifetime series if I ever heard one) can all breathe easy today, because they won’t be publicly outed any time soon. Well, four of them, anyway. I’m sureĀ Jessica Mulroney would have been positively giddy to get the Google alert that her name was trending again. But we’ll never know which of Meghan’s five friends spoke to People magazine last year in her defense, because a judge has decided their names won’t be published.

In February 2019, People published a cover story in which five of Meghan’s friends, all remaining anonymous, spoke the “truth” about her in an attempt to fight back against the British press, which was very vocally anti-Meghan. It was assumed they did so because no one in the Royal Family was stepping up to defend Meghan from the hate and she couldn’t do it herself.

Meghan is in the middle of a lawsuit against Associated Newspapers (for publishing a private letter she wrote to her father Thomas Markle). Associated Newspapers owns The Daily Mail. The Daily Mail was threatening to out Meghan’s army of good PR, and last month she filed court papers to prevent them from doing so. CNBC reports that after much deliberation, Judge Mark Warby of London’s High Court ruled in favor of Meghan and her friends’ privacy.

Their names could not be published as part of the her lawsuit in which she says the Mail invaded her privacy and breached her copyright. The anonymity issue is a preliminary matter with the full trial not expected until next year.

The reason The Daily Mail wanted to publish the names of Meghan’s friends had to do with Associated Newspapers trying to argue that if privacy was so important to her, then she wouldn’t have let her friends run to People to spill details about her personal life. But the only problem there is, Meghan has said that she never asked her friends to do that. So this fight is currently tied at one-one.

I’m glad for Meghan that she won the right to keep the identity of her friends anonymous. But in doing so, she also kind of handed a win over to the British press too. Because without confirmation on the identities of the friends who spoke up for her, the relentless Meghan-haters in the British press can speculate who they think spoke to People. And knowing them, it will probably be something like: “We believe the friends that spoke to People were Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Moloch, and Mephistopheles, because Meghan is the devil!!!!!!

Pic: Wenn.com

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