Meghan Markle has filed a court application seeking to stop the Associated Newspapers from naming the five friends who spoke to the media anonymously to defend her. The publisher owns the tabloid, Mail on Sunday, which she is suing for privacy breach. The Duchess of Sussex said the news outlet has been threatening to name her friends for "clickbait" but they are not the ones on trial.
According to CNN, the names of the five friends were submitted and provided to the judge confidentially as part of Meghan Markle's defense against the tabloid. A source said that threat to reveal their identities "has nothing to do with the case" but the tabloid, allegedly, plans to target the women in their websites and newspapers.
Meghan Markle's five friends gave an interview in February 2019 to People to defend the Duchess of Sussex from the bad press and the bullying she was receiving from the British tabloid media. Named as her "inner circle," the friends decided to speak up after seeing Meghan in a state they have apparently never seen before, especially since she was pregnant at that time.
In that same lawsuit, Meghan told the court that she felt unprotected by the institution of the royal family and she was not allowed to defend herself from the bad press. Allegedly, Kensington Palace prevented her from speaking up, so her friends decided they will give the anonymous interview.
That interview is cited in the defense of Mail on Sunday, which is being sued for data breach because they published parts of a letter Meghan specifically wrote to her father, Thomas Markle. But the news outlet said that they have not breached her privacy because her friends talked about the letter in their People interview before they published the excerpts.
Meghan said that she was not involved in her friends' decision to speak to People. The Duchess of Sussex also defended her friends in the newly-filed court order, saying that they deserve the basic right to privacy and must not be named in public.
Mail on Sunday's legal team said that they have no intention of publishing the five friends' identities. However, they informed the lawyers of the Duchess of Sussex that their confidentiality must be "properly considered by the court."
A source from the Kensington Palace, on the other hand, said that their "no comment" approach to the fake stories published by the tabloid has been their go-to position from the beginning. The source said the policy exist not because they refused to protect Meghan Markle but because they don't want to give fake stories more oxygen.
