Meghan Markle faces fresh challenge over letter to father as Prince Harry speaks at RE:WIRED 2021

Prince Harry reveals his fears for wife Meghan Markle amid a fresh legal challenge over a letter to her estranged father.

Prince Harry has slammed the harmful effects of “misinformation” on social media, saying he’s determined not to lose Meghan Markle like he lost his late mother, Princess Diana.

Speaking at the tech conference RE:WIRED 2021, Prince Harry revealed his fears as he warned of “the real cost of a lie on the internet”.

“I lost my mother to this self-manufactured rabidness, and obviously I’m determined not to lose the mother [of] my children to the same thing.”

Prince Harry has slammed the harmful effects of social media. Picture: AFP

“First off, I’ve said this before and I’ll say this again, misinformation is a global humanitarian crisis,” Harry, 37, said.

“The scariest part about it is that you don’t need to be online to be affected by this.

“I learned from a very early age that the incentives of publishing are not necessarily aligned with the incentives of truth.”

It comes as a UK newspaper group began a legal challenge on Tuesday over a ruling that it breached the Duchess of Sussex’s privacy by publishing parts of a letter she wrote to her estranged father.

Prince Harry with his late mother Princess Diana on holiday in Majorca, Spain in 1987. Picture: Getty Images

Meghan, 40, successfully sued Associated Newspapers Limited, which publishes the Daily Mail, MailOnline and Mail on Sunday, over a series of articles based on the letter to Thomas Markle.

A High Court judge in February, arguing that the handwritten letter was “personal and private”, said publication was “manifestly excessive and hence unlawful” and ordered Associated to print a front-page statement acknowledging her victory.

It has not yet done so because of the appeal, in which lawyers for the publishers argue that the letter was written with the knowledge that it could be made public.

Meghan Markle’s letter to her father was written a few months after her wedding to Prince Harry. Picture: AFP

“We read the judgment as implicitly accepting that the letter was crafted as an intimate communication for her father’s eyes only,” said one of the lawyers, Andrew Caldecott.

But he said that was “false” based on new evidence from Meghan and her husband Prince Harry’s former communications secretary, Jason Knauf, which suggests she suspected her father may leak its contents.

“The letter was crafted specifically with the potential of public consumption in mind because the claimant appreciated Mr Markle might disclose it to the media,” he added.

Caldecott pointed to an interview given by five of her friends to the US magazine People, which her father considered to be “a serious attack on him”.

Meghan “made no effort to correct” it, he added. At the original hearing, Associated argued its articles were intended to correct inaccuracies in the People interview.

Thomas Markle has been outspoken about the fallout with his daughter Meghan. Picture: 60 Minutes/Nine Network

Caldecott said Meghan’s father had a right to reply and that she had no “reasonable expectation of privacy of the text of the letter”, as it had already been widely reported.

He said Knauf’s evidence cast doubt on the original ruling, adding that the case should have gone to a full trial.

The letter to her 77-year-old father was written a few months after her wedding to Harry, who is Queen Elizabeth II’s grandson.

In it, Meghan asked her father to stop talking to tabloid newspapers and making false claims about her in interviews.

Meghan and Harry have waged a high-profile war against the media, blaming intrusion for their decision to quit royal life last year and move to the United States.

But they have since attracted criticism for launching themselves into the public eye with a series of lucrative deals with firms including Spotify, Netflix and Apple TV+.

Originally published as Meghan Markle faces fresh challenge over letter to father as Prince Harry speaks at RE:WIRED 2021