Duchess Meghan is suing Associated Newspapers Limited over a Mail On Sunday article that featured parts of a handwritten note she’d written to her father Thomas Markle in August 2018. In the leaked note, Meghan wrote that her father broke her heart “into a million pieces” by slamming the British royal family and her marriage to Prince Harry.
But now in official court documents, the five friends who defended the Duchess of Sussex against her father in an article by PEOPLE have been named – though they are only referred to as A, B, C, D and E in the official papers.
The five can now be called to testify at a trial – though Meghan denies she authorised the friends to speak out. In the original PEOPLE article, the friends were referred to as “Meghan’s inner circle – a longtime friend, a former co-star, a friend from LA, a one-time colleague and a close confidante'”.
The Duchess of Sussex has also denied saying she felt “victimised” by her father and claims that she told him she had “only one father”. In the court papers, Meghan says she wrote to Thomas as she felt he “had consistently allowed himself to be manipulated by the tabloid media despite her trying to persuade him not to speak to them for his own good”.
The American-born royal also believes she is entitled to a “reasonable expectation of privacy” and never thought the letter would be published.
Meghan has furthermore claimed in the documents that she suffered “tremendous emotional distress and damage to her mental health” after so much media attention and that her friends felt “silenced” by Kensington Palace and unable to defend her.
“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,” the documents read.
To top things off, Meghan also claimed that her 2018 royal wedding to Prince Harry brought in a whopping £1 billion in tourism cash that “far outweighed” taxpayers’ contributions towards security.
“Any public costs incurred for the wedding were solely for security and crowd control to protect members of the public, as deemed necessary by Thames Valley Police and the Metropolitan Police,” a submission from her legal team says.
The legal papers also stated that Meghan is “a member of the royal family and does not undertake paid work”, but the Duchess of Sussex falsified those claims by naming Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, as well as Prince Michael of Kent.
The Duchess said that “several member[s] of the Royal Family do ‘undertake paid work’ including, for example, Princess Beatrice of York, Princess Eugenie of York and Prince Michael of Kent”.
Beatrice and Eugenie, the daughters of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, are not working royals and are under no obligation to attend royal events – whilst Beatrice works in finance and consulting, her younger sister Eugenie is a director at a London art gallery.