Meghan Markle handed win in court battle with U.K. tabloid

Meghan Markle is celebrating another big victory over a U.K. tabloid after a court sided with her in the privacy case.

A judge ruled earlier this year that the Mail on Sunday interfered with the Duchess of Sussex's "reasonable expectation" of privacy when publishing portions of a letter that she wrote to her father in 2018, and on Thursday, a U.K. court dismissed an appeal brought by the tabloid's publisher, Associated Newspapers, CNN reports.

"Those contents were personal, private and not matters of legitimate public interest," the court ruled. "The articles in the Mail on Sunday interfered with the duchess's reasonable expectation of privacy."

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Meghan sued Associated Newspapers over the publication of parts of the letter, which the publisher argued was not an invasion of her privacy. Amid the court battle, a former communications secretary for the Duchess of Sussex told the court that she said referring to her father as "Daddy" in the letter would "pull at the heartstrings" and that she had the "understanding that it could be leaked," which the Mail on Sunday argued showed the letter was "crafted with readership by the public in mind," per Page Six. Meghan said, however, that she did "not want any of it to be published" but "wanted to ensure that the risk of it being manipulated or misleadingly edited was minimized," The Associated Press reports.

Meghan in a statement Thursday celebrated the court's decision as a "victory not just for me, but for anyone who has ever felt scared to stand up for what's right," adding, "While this win is precedent setting, what matters most is that we are now collectively brave enough to reshape a tabloid industry that conditions people to be cruel, and profits from the lies and pain that they create." She also accused the publisher of trying to make a "straightforward case extraordinarily convoluted" in order to "generate more headlines and sell more newspapers."