Harry and Meghan - OP updated with Threadbanned Users 4/5/21

But was he telling the truth though regardless of relevance to the actual case being lost? I reckon he was. The judge re-iterated that they printed too much and Meghans credibility snuffed it in the process. A pyrrhic victory since she brought about the case itself no matter how it can be dressed up.

You see this was a glimpse into getting something approaching the other side of the grand story here, a side we are never going to hear the full story from (e.g. William doing an Oprah tell all) yet even a few emails via Knaufs evidence was sufficient in skewering the incessant and still ongoing pulling-at-the-heart-strings victim playing. Perhaps the idea of Knauf being under an NDA imbued Meghan with the confidence to press ahead knowing he wouldn't be involved. Ultimately he was. Even if it really was William authorising a "f*ck you" after the Oprah bullshit then I guess if you throw a proverbial punch then there should be no surprise if you get a punch in return.

She wrote the letter with feedback and guidance from Knauf. But you say Knauf should have had nothing to do with it. I would say he was absolutely relevant to that case regardless of inferred affiliations. As to why William doesn't do a tell all. His father, his mother, his brother and sister in law, his uncle did them. They all went splendidly didn't they. I see a pattern perhaps William does too.

To recap the case. It is 2018 and Meghan is asked by the family to visit her not media shy father in private. She suggests a letter is better. She crafts it with Knaufs help to pull at the publics heart strings as there will be the expectation that "Dear Daddy" will leak it. It is delivered but Thomas holds onto it. Six months later he is still holding on to it and then suddenly five anonymous friends talk to People magazine and he is thrown under the bus while Meghan is aggrandised in parallel. The letter and some content of that letter is mentioned by these friends.

This presumably provokes her Dad to get his side out and so he goes to ANL with the letter. They print circa 50% of the letter. They get sued. A judge sides with Meghan. Excessive use of the letter. Privacy breached. ANL appeal. Knauf is involved. ANL argue that it wasn't private since it was written with the expectation that it would be made public by her not media shy father. It was thus in the public interest. In lieu of an actual trial Meghan apologises for misleading them because perjury. Judge doesn't allow such arguments to reach trial. Confirms initial ruling. Meghan wins £1. Posts aggrandising statement about victory over the Daily Fail but to anyone being rational her reputation and integrity is dented. Meanwhile the "scum of the earth" presumably makes multiples on subsequent coverage than what they would have paid out in costs. Who then really won here? Would that letter have been even given to ANL if there was no People magazine article attacking her fathers character?

I would be of the opinion that William may well have acquiesced to Knauf giving details. If you're a realist then you accept that there is the Press and that this Press (both those favourable and antagonistic) needs to be managed. Harry didn’t like the antagonistic side and chose to battle them. One could, like Harry, see this as them getting into bed with the press or one could see it as being the old Godfather tactic of keeping your friends close but keep your enemies closer i.e. you schmooze and have wining and dining press relations with all factions of the press and royal rota. You'll get the inevitable Clarkson went to a lunch hosted by Camilla and then he wrote a hateful Meghan article after it thus Camilla is leaking to Clarkson logic but it ignores the idea of him being there with a litany of other journos/media and the article was written while a certain docuseries was broadcast and making headlines. You'll also get people thinking that the Royals entertaining toxic characters as being done to cover up their nefarious affairs. Whereas in reality the gig is to be amiable to each and everyone, even the arseholes like Piers Morgan et al. Interestingly Harry never mentions this angle in his book. I mean it would be solid gold tea in outing his brother as a cheat desperate enough to cover it up that he is engaging in a quid pro quo with the press and serving his brother and his wife up as sacrificial lambs to take the heat off himself. I don't buy that at all. Maybe it is in some of the 400 pages he left out (or that Penguins lawyers took out).

I think the Times bullying allegations (also involving a whistle blowing Knauf) in the days before the Oprah interview likely stemmed from Williams agreement. I suppose when your family is about to be thrown under a bus then something needs to be done. You can call that gutless but I'd see it as clandestine management of a problem. What did he say in the aftermath? That his family wasn’t racist? Well he was right since his brother confirmed it. I could easily envisage the Queen and Charles being inert regarding it all. Who knows, maybe the monarchy is indeed on its last legs and in time we'll get Williams side of things via a memoir or a tell all interview. As it is then it is just never explain, never complain but engage in Machiavellian strategies beneath that surface to prolong the monarchy (i.e. Times bullying, Knauf testimony). Finally, it is worth pointing out that both of those examples are reactionary in that Knauf wouldn’t be testifying if there was no trial to begin with, if Meghan had made peace with her Dad or if there was no Oprah interview. I’d be with you in saying it was gutless carry on if those things were made public without the provocation which seemingly elicited them.

Again she is the aggrandising hero and the victim at the same time. Are you missing the point I continually make about reputation? i.e. that Meghan was shown to be manipulative with an unfortunate lapse of memory. Once you get a reputation like that then it follows you and so any subsequent "I was only protecting Harry" word salad needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. So she can say constantly berating was happening but why should she be believed? That isn't factual. It is her opinion. It emerged that an option open to her was to go a visit her father in private. It looked like they were willing to make whatever arrangements they could to square it all away for her. That is despite subsequent accusations of not helping her at all. It is telling from the article that Meghan chose a letter because she knew it would be leaked and she could protect Harry by pointing out that her father was still doing media despite best efforts to stop it and they should leave him alone. Turns out that her Dad wasn't playing ball and didn't say anything publicly until that is he was provoked by anonymous sources in the People magazine article, an article which says he wrote back. Is it plausible that people were asked to go on record anonymously and talk about the contents of that private letter so as to coax a reply? It is to my mind.

You can say Knauf is a snake if you like but from that same article you see how he was once Harry and Meghans fixer and middle man for Finding Freedom, the book they weren't involved with. He was happy to have their friends talk to the authors and in the end did so himself so they could deny their involvement. If he is a snake then at one point he was their snake. If the boss of a snake is also a snake as you infer then Harry and Meghan must be snakes too then. But it is obviously William who is now the big bad considering Knauf is now working with him and that those very same fixer and middle man type shenanigans are happening for Williams explicit benefit and not for Harry and Meghan anymore.

How was she manipulative. Her father was being used by the Press to get at her. There was absolutely no chance that she could have gone to see her father in private with the snakes in the Firm feeding info to the tabloids. How do you know it would have been any better if she had gone to see him. She asked him to stop talking to the press and he would not. What kind of a father is he? She choose a letter rather than a text or email because that could be manipulated by the press. Why do you think she was so paranoid about what she said or did was going to be manipulated and be on the front page of the press? You think she should have put up with that kind of ****? Why are you so convinced that going to see her father would have meant that he would have stopped talking to the press? You claim that the father wasn't talking to the press, please explain why the Royal Family were harassing Harry to get Meghan to get him to stop talking to the press. (For the record, I think Thomas Markle was being manipulated by Samantha Markle as she was trying to make money out of the connection - she wrote the book, Princess Pushy).

Knauf was Meghan & Harry's manipulater - not fixer. He gave very bad advice. He was the one who was charged with looking after Thomas Markle for the wedding. He did nothing to protect him from the press. Considering the harrassment her mother had to deal with, he failed miserably on that score and is still failing miserably as William's CEO of the Earthshot programme. What planet is he on to think that not having the recipients of the Earthshot prizes at the prize giving, but it was ok to fly David Beckham in from the world cup to attend the ceremony. And Caroline Kennedy gave it a quick swerve as well by finding an excuse not to attend the ceremony.

William also had 'Simon Case as his private secretary - you know the guy who Boris Johnson recruited to be his chief of staff in Downing Street and Head of the British Civil Service. This is the person who thought it was ok to investigate partygate in Downing Street when he himself was attending the parties! That tells you all you need to know about him and his integrity (he also arranged the 800K loan for Boris by the Chairman of the BBC).

Nobody knew who her father or even her sister was before she met Harry. Some Suits fans might have but to the general public they were unknowns. Then she becomes one of the most famous people on the planet and obviously this will create wider media interest in her family. The Raglands for their part were drawn into this but they haven't been as thoroughly meddlesome as the Markles have been. Her paternal family did court this new attention and while they may or may not have enjoyed that intrusive attention they certainly took the opportunity to hustle a buck off the back of it. I can see why Meghan would have wanted to cut ties but a consequence of marrying a Prince foisted them all into the public eye. It was a situation which needed squaring away. It was toxic to the point that Tom Junior wrote Harry a warning letter, a letter which was then derided but to some in hindsight seems rather prescient with what subsequently happened. I think her paternal side had the capacity to show that the self-made sizzler salad success story was a fairy tale and so having Harry and his family avoid these people like the plague was a motivating factor in that regard. Again just my take. I think there was no need for letters or texts or emails. From an objective point of view then it seems that money was a motivation for her father, her sister and her brother. Could she have gone to see him, suss him out and perhaps agree for his finances to be taken care of in lieu of him signing on a dotted line to keep quiet in return? NDA’s being all the rage in such circles. I think that is what the royal family were perhaps angling towards. Take care of it. Pay them off. Make it go away. Considering the Andrew pay off then it is clear they have means of making their problems go away. If that is the case then they were seeking to protect Meghan as a working member of the firm i.e. do what you can to pay off your family and keep them quiet. This was not long after they had done a £32 million wedding and to my mind this was the Firm pressing for something to be done in order to protect two people wanting to hit the ground running and enjoying a wave of popularity. Even if this did happen and money was offered then the optics of trying to shut people up with money is a bad look for the Firm.

Odd how Harry was attending a purely legal argument session in London, ahead of the actual hearing - if one ensues. And by the front door, was that simply to make an "entrance"? Of course it was! Pity the poor photographer who was bumped out of the way. NB Elton John used the side entrance.

Odd that he is claiming invasion of privacy when the Oprah interview, the Spare book, the reality show on Netflix etc basically demonstrated H&M's invasion of privacy of others - the "older woman" he first encountered (praise be for her fortitude once he spilt the beans; no pun intended) who turned out to be younger than Meghan - William, his father, the UK Forces; need I keep going??

Odd that H&M have double standards. He wasn't concerned about the click of cameras yesterday, perhaps his pay-per-view sessions with Dr Maté have cured his PTSD.

Odd that there was no Police protection for him, given that he's suing the Home Office about their withdrawal of same.

Odd that he flew several thousand miles to make these appearances, yet is reminding everyone of the climate damage of flying.

Odd, in all dimensions.

Compared to Harry, yea.

I left the UK because the "Institution" didn't protect us from the media but now I'm complaining that the "Institution" protected me too much from the media.

👌

What's that saying, be nice to the people you meet on the way up as you might meet them again on the way back down?

I think the royal family eventually understood that the best way to approach the press was to be friendly with them (even if it meant being superficially so) but to also keep them very much at arms length. Charles' hiring of a former Daily Mail editor as comms director/consigliere was indicative of how wishing away the tabloid press wasn't an option but reluctantly embracing it needed to be done in order to manage it as the way forward. I'd imagine Harry viewed such a development as his dad getting into bed with the devil. A quid pro quo arrangement which clearly irked Harry who thinks it was the press who killed his mother.

I don't think he has any intellectual curiosity. It is worth pointing out that his own mother was the trail blazer in regards to unable-to-beat-them so joining them instead. I wonder what he makes of the fact she was close friends with the likes of Richard Kay the then Daily Mail editor, how she had invited Piers Morgan to lunch with herself and William so they could all get to know each other, how she was on first name terms with editors of the gutter press many of whom got invites for private talks in Kensington Palace (e.g. those from the Sun and the Mirror only months before she died) etc. Diana knew how the tabloids operated and she had even used them to her own advantage (e.g. the famous photo of her alone sitting in front of the Taj Mahal was arranged with the press). She knew it was give and take and she knew in being so hunted she had the capacity to use that to her own advantage particularly in sticking it to her ex-husband and his missus but also embracing the tabloids to highlight her genuine interest in the causes she was passionate about. It was the tabloids who routinely championed her but the broadsheets who dismissed her funnily enough. She knew that courting the media with one hand and rejecting them as Harry did was a circling the drain recipe for disaster. For example had his mother lived and set up her own Archewell type foundation then I highly doubt public donations in a given year would have been embarrassingly small amounts like $4,500.

It is why you see William and the family being intelligent about their press relations and likely understood the dynamic his mother had with the media. I don't think Harry ever gave it serious thought. This is the guy who says his family kept the extent of the phone hacking from him. That would rely on him not knowing that it was his brother and their mutual pal Tom Bradby who were the ones who initially sparked an investigation into it all. It resulted in a very public trial where a PI and a News of the World editor got jailed in 2007 for hacking members of the royal family (a then partying hard Harry being of particular interest included assuming he was actually paying attention). It is unbelievable that any adult in that family was not at least familiar with a public trial about criminality against that family but apparently Harry wasn't being told anything. According to a recent BBC article he really only started talking to senior lawyers for the Royal family when he began dating Meghan and what he deems "defamatory stories" were being published.

When this is someone so keen on controlling a narrative that they have their comms director engaging with authors then this is not a coincidence to my mind. It was the press doing what the press have always done. He could have embraced what his mother understood about the nature of the press and gone along with the nose holding tit for tat or he could (quite clearly) have gone down the path of engaging only with those who aggrandised them, who blew smoke up their holes and asked the softball questions. Doing the latter doesn't mean the tabloids go away though despite whatever crusade he thinks he is fighting for the good of his country. So the press turned on them. They could have managed their way out of it or they could have cut and run. They did the latter.

See above post about wanting to call the tune with the media i.e. when Dad and my brother play the media game they are in bed with the devil but when Mum did it *la la la la* I can't hear you. Believe that a grown man was unaware of criminal prosecutions for phone hacking his own family if you like.

What I gather is that Harrys argument is based on Gavin Burrows' statement about acting on behalf of ANL to target thousands of people. Now a second statement from Burrows has denied it all. That is the defense for ANL. Murky stuff indeed. If his case is predicated on this alone then it will be hard to win. The judge has told them to adjust their expectations. Translation: Your key witness is a liar. Unless you have more credible evidence to take to trial then you will lose here.

Re the Samantha Markle case it is a technicality i.e. Meghan provided information to Scobie but she didn't write the book. She will instead now have to focus on the words said via the Oprah interview instead. I doubt she will win there either to be honest.

Jesus, you're delving in to the world of GOT fantasy here with poor sweet innocent Sussexes being betrayed, double crossed and wanted dead by everyone in the RF because they only wanted to live their own life. My heart breaks for them and their plight. 😥

I think this is a better summary of what is happening in the court case. There is restricted reporting on the case (requested by Defendants), so no one is named at this stage. From what I understand, there are three Paps/PI's who have owned up to unlawfully bugging for the Daily Mail. Burrows has given a statement to the Claimants that he did bug on behalf of the DM. He also gave a statement to the DM that it didn't request him to commit any criminal activity! In other words, they just told him to get the info and paid him for it! The Claimants barrister has stated that this is a reason for the case to go to trial to actually find out which statement Burroes had made is true!

This Sky courtroom report gives a much fuller description of what went on in court (i.e., it reports what the judge was saying) than what other publications are reporting despite the limitations on reporting requested by the DM (and imposed by the Judge).

As for Samantha Markle, its not just a technicality: https://www.rte.ie/entertainment/2023/0331/1367412-defamation-case-against-duchess-of-sussex-dismissed/