Today, Thursday, marks the third and final day of an appeal hearing into the Duchess of Sussex’s lawsuit against the Mail on Sunday and their corporate owner. I previewed the appeal earlier this week, knowing that the Mail and other British outlets were going to cover the hearing extensively all week. And that’s exactly what’s happening. Meghan won her summary judgment in the case in February, where the judge found that yes, of course the MoS violated Meghan’s copyright when the paper published selections from a hand-written letter she wrote to her father. Meghan wrote the letter to her father in the summer 2018, but Thomas Markle didn’t give/sell the letter to the MoS until early 2019. Toxic Tom did so, he claims, in response to a People Magazine cover story where Meghan’s friends revealed the existence of a letter.

One of the important things to remember about the letter and the lag time between Meghan sending the letter and the Mail publishing the letter is that Thomas Markle had been lying in interview after interview during that lag time. He claimed repeatedly that Meghan had not contacted him whatsoever following his “heart attack.” She did. She wrote him that letter begging him to stop talking to the press. She also knew her father, and knew he would likely sell the letter eventually, because she knows that he’s a toxic dumpster fire. I always said – admiringly – that I loved the trap Meghan set. There is still so much elegance to it. But of course, the Mail is still big mad that they fell head first into her trap. So the Mail is now trying to make it into Breaking News that Jason Knauf’s texts with Meghan at the time reveal that Meghan had some idea that her father would likely sell the letter:

Meghan Markle has been accused of a “direct contradiction” after private messages to an aide were revealed in a court case. The Duchess of Sussex’s lawyers sued U.K. tabloid The Mail on Sunday over a letter she sent her father and said in an initial filing that she “intended the detailed contents of the Letter to be private.”

However, Jason Knauf, her former communications secretary, has handed private texts and emails to the newspaper which show Meghan telling him she wrote it “with the understanding that it could be leaked.”

Meghan sent Knauf a draft of the letter asking his advice before sending the final version in August 2018. A message the duchess sent him, released by the Court of Appeal, read: “Obviously everything I’ve drafted is with the understanding that it could be leaked so I have been meticulous in my word choice but please do let me know if anything stands out to you as a liability.”

She added: “Honestly Jason, I feel fantastic, cathartic and real and honest and factual. If he leaks it then that’s on his conscience but at least the world will know the truth, words I could never voice publicly.”

[From Newsweek]

This is mind-numbingly stupid for the Mail and other outlets to latch onto. Oh, Meghan MEANT for her father to release the letter? No. She knew her father was and is scum. She knew that he was likely to leak the letter at some point. It doesn’t follow that she always meant for the letter to become public, she was just taking pains to write it a certain way IN CASE it became public. She baited a trap. She didn’t push anyone into the trap.

Also from the Jason Knauf files, there was a lot of back-and-forth between Knauf and both Harry and Meghan about Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand’s Finding Freedom. While FF was never meant to be an “authorized” biography, anyone with half a brain knows that FF was as close to authorized as most royal biographies get. The British papers are making a huuuuge deal about Meghan “lying” about just how much correspondence she actually had with Scobie and Durand. This was perhaps a trap which Meghan fell into herself – she never should have strongly denied involvement with the book, especially given that ALL royals have helped along their unauthorized biographers off-the-record. That’s all Meghan and Harry did. They should have just owned that upfront: “Of course we wanted to set the record straight about some issues, just like Charles and Camilla have done with their biographers.”

Now, should we talk about how the Mail got this cache of Jason Knauf’s emails and texts? It looks so bad that the man who is still employed by William and Kate (through their foundation) is doing their keen dirty work on behalf of the Mail! It’s also kind of funny that every royal reporter on Isla de Saltines is fanatically covering this hearing… all for a woman who has not stepped foot on that toxic island since March 2020.

Photos courtesy of Instar, Avalon Red, YouTube, Archewell.