MEGHAN Markle could face a fresh High Court privacy battle over her letter to her dad Thomas.
The royal was set to receive an apology after the judge ruled a national paper breached her privacy when it printed extracts of a five-page letter she’d written to Thomas Markle.
Mail Online and The Mail on Sunday had been ordered to print a front-page statement about Meghan’s victory earlier this month.
However now The Court of Appeal has confirmed that it is “in receipt of an application for permission to appeal”, according to Newsweek.
ANL were initially refused permission to appeal against that decision, but applied directly to the Court of Appeal against the order requiring both The Mail On Sunday and MailOnline to publish the statements.
Last month the paper also won the right to use a smaller typeface than originally demanded when they print the statement.
The pregnant duchess, 39, sued ANL over a series of articles which reproduced parts of a “heartfelt” letter sent to Mr Markle, 76, in August 2018.
She claimed the five articles published in February 2019 involved a misuse of her private information, breached her copyright and breached the Data Protection Act.
Meghan was granted summary judgment in relation to her privacy claim, meaning she won that part of the case without having to go to trial, as well as most of her copyright claim.
Last month, the judge made the order that The Mail On Sunday must publish a front-page apology to Meghan.
The statement must also run on MailOnline for a week with a link to the court’s full ruling on Meghan’s win, he ruled.
The same edition of the newspaper will have to state on page three that the High Court gave judgment for the Duchess on her claim for copyright infringement.
It will also have to include the following statement: “The court found that Associated Newspapers infringed her copyright by publishing extracts of her handwritten letter to her father in The Mail On Sunday and in MailOnline.”
It comes after the judge said publication of Meghan’s letter to her father was “manifestly excessive and hence unlawful”.
He said: “It was, in short, a personal and private letter.
“The majority of what was published was about the claimant’s own behaviour, her feelings of anguish about her father’s behaviour, as she saw it, and the resulting rift between them.
“These are inherently private and personal matters.”
He said “the only tenable justification for any such interference was to correct some inaccuracies about the letter”, contained in an article in People magazine, published just days before ANL’s five articles, which featured an interview with five friends of Meghan.
He also said ANL’s arguments on ownership of the copyright of the letter “seem to me to occupy the shadowland between improbability and unreality”.
