Meghan Markle has claimed her wedding to Prince Harry made £1bn in tourism revenue for the UK in legal proceedings against British tabloids.
And her lawyers claim that her wedding was “not, in fact, publicly funded, but rather personally financed by HRH The Prince of Wales”.
They say that “any public costs incurred for the wedding were solely for security and crowd control to protect members of the public”, reports celebrity news site Page Six.
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And in legal papers filed at the High Court, the Duchess of Sussex’s legal team said Markle had suffered “damage to her mental health” because the palace failed to protect her.
Markle is suing the owners of The Mail on Sunday for a breach of privacy over its publication of a letter from her father, Thomas Markle.
She lost the first round of proceedings against Associated Newspapers last week, when a judge ruled part of the case should be struck out. The new legal papers were issued in response to questions from Mail lawyers, who asked why she felt “vulnerable” in early 2019.
At the time she was heavily pregnant, as well as suffering “aggressive attacks” by the media.
The duchess’s team said the royal household had failed to protect her from these attacks, and let her become the subject of “a large number of false and damaging articles by the UK tabloid media… which caused tremendous emotional distress and damage to her mental health”, reports the Daily Mirror.
They said: “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.”
