There’s been an update in the lawsuit that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have filed against the Mail on Sunday. Apparently the Mail keeps asking Meghan’s legal team for more information. In a f-cked up way, this helps the Daily Mail generate more content. Because every time they get a response, they cherry-pick the parts they want to focus on and publish new stories about her. 

 

Here’s Omid Scobie’s thread about the latest legal development:

As you can see, one of the Daily Mail’s rebuttals has to been to fixate on whether or not Meghan knew that her friends were speaking anonymously to PEOPLE Magazine in defence of her. She insists that she didn’t, and even you don’t believe her, that’s kind of irrelevant to what this case is about – the relentless attacks against her by the British tabloid media. How is “she told her friends to stick up for her!” a justification for their incessant lying about her? 

Anyway, I’m not using up words to explain what you already know about the Daily Mail and the Sun. Instead let’s focus on this part of Meghan’s most recent legal response because there’s the lawsuit and then there’s the family politics and backstabbing within the royal family which exacerbated Harry and Meghan’s distress: 

 

“Unprotected by the Institution, and prohibited from defending herself” – this statement has been made in a legal document, sent on behalf of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, that basically calls out the fact that their royal relatives did not pull up for them. Which is not news. Both Harry and Meghan have already made it clear that they did not feel like they were supported. I mean, they put an ocean and a continent between themselves and the crown. I feel like this is pretty obvious. 

Endorsing it in writing in a legal filing, however, kinda puts a renewed emphasis on it. They’re clearly still hurt and presumably have no f-cks to give about who knows about it. And that’s just the first part; we haven’t even gotten to the “prohibited from defending herself” part. Being “prohibited from defending herself” is tantamount to being silenced. Harry and Meghan are contending that they were held back from voicing their concerns by their family members who not only weren’t properly backing them but allegedly minimising their experience by telling them to suck it up. In other words, don’t stand up to bullying, don’t fight back against prejudice, put protocol and appearances ahead of your own pain and abuse. To preserve the status quo. All while they continued to protect another prince who was friends with a dead rapist pedophile. A prince whose other friend was just arrested. And who certainly, up to just last year, was not given the same amount of critical coverage in the British tabloids, even though Prince Andrew’s associations are undeniably, undebatably, universally reprehensible. 

Here’s another interesting development though – you may remember that about a month ago, Byline Investigates looked into the relationship between the Sun’s Dan Wootton and whether or not he paid £4,000 to Callum Stephens for breaking the story that Harry and Meghan were leaving the royal family. Callum Stephens is the partner of Christian Jones. Christian Jones is Prince William and Catherine’s press secretary. Dan Wootton and Christian Jones have denied these shenanigans but for almost a year now people have been gossiping in media circles about Dan and Christian’s alleged friendship. And whether or not viper courtiers at the palaces have been selling out the Sussexes. 

 

Now it appears that other media outlets, like ITV, are looking into Dan Wootton’s reporting practices at the Sun. Private Eye, a satirical news and politics magazine in the UK that gets pretty inside baseball on the media and political leaders, just published this article about the situation behind the scenes at the Sun and their payment system. This is a hardcopy that I was able to obtain because there is no online version of the story so enlarge your screen to read it:

If this story is to be believed, it’s not just the royal institution that’s being confronted, it’s also by extension the royal media institution. Harry and Meghan have quite publicly declared themselves against what they call “the Cartel”, the group of royal reporters assigned to cover royal stories. Is the Cartel imploding?