Bhubaneswar: After a two-year-long legal battle, Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, won the privacy claim case against a tabloid newspaper for publishing a private letter she wrote to her estranged father.

Pronouncing the judgment, Lord Justice Warby said, “It was, in short, a personal and private letter. The majority of what was published was about the claimant’s own behaviour, her feelings of anguish about her father’s behaviour – as she saw it – and the resulting rift between them. These are inherently private and personal matters.”

“The claimant had a reasonable expectation that the contents of the letter would remain private. The articles interfered with that reasonable expectation.”

In a statement, Meghan said: “After two long years of pursuing litigation, I am grateful to the courts for holding Associated Newspapers and the Mail on Sunday to account for their illegal and dehumanising practices.

“These tactics – and those of their sister publications Mail Online and the Daily Mail – are not new … For these outlets, it’s a game. For me and so many others, it’s real life, real relationships and very real sadness. The damage they have done and continue to do runs deep.

“The world needs reliable, fact-checked, high-quality news. What the Mail on Sunday and its partner publications do is the opposite. We all lose when misinformation sells more than truth, when moral exploitation sells more than decency, and when companies create their business model to profit from people’s pain.

“But, for today, with this comprehensive win on both privacy and copyright, we have all won. We now know, and hope it creates legal precedent, that you cannot take somebody’s privacy and exploit it in a privacy  case, as the defendant has balantly done over the past two years.”