In the last few months, Meghan Markle has been hit with setbacks in her lawsuit against the publisher of the Mail on Sunday, including one ruling just over a week ago that said a revealing royal biography could be entered into evidence. But finally, Meghan and her husband, Prince Harry, have secured a win in their fight to regain some privacy after a few tough years in the spotlight. They have settled a lawsuit against paparazzi agency X17 over photographs of their son, Archie Mountbatten-Windsor, the New York Times reports.
Meghan and Harry filed the lawsuit in July after finding out that photographs taken at the home they were borrowing from Tyler Perry were being shopped around with the claim of having been taken in public; they eventually appeared in a German magazine. At the time of the filing, the name of the agency was still unidentified. According to the Times, the original suit allowed their lawyer, Michael J. Kump, to subpoena three of the biggest agencies in Los Angeles to find out which was responsible. The culprit, X17, has agreed to give the photos to the couple, destroy any copies, and cease trafficking in images of the family “in any private residence or the surrounding private grounds,” according to a settlement filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The company has also agreed to pay some of Meghan and Harry’s legal fees.
“We apologize to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and their son for the distress we have caused,” the agency said in a statement. “We were wrong to offer these photographs and commit to not doing so again.”
When the couple originally filed the suit, they noted that they also intended for it to serve as a warning to any buyers interested in the photos. “They also seek to put any prospective purchasers of the photos on notice that they were taken illegally and are not what they purport to be,” the complaint read. According to the Times, the images were marketed as though they were taken in a public area, not in a private home. In the original complaint, the couple noted that Archie hadn’t been in public since the pair moved to Southern California.
Harry’s resistance to paparazzi intrusion has been decades in the making. “He still blames the paparazzi for his mother’s death, and he will do everything in his power to protect his family,” a family friend told Vanity Fair in July.
The news comes just over a year after Harry and Meghan launched their first salvos against the press while still on a 10-day tour of Southern Africa. First Meghan sued Associated Newspapers over the Mail on Sunday’s February 2019 publication of a letter she wrote to her father, Thomas Markle. A few days later Harry filed suits against The Sun and The Mirror over alleged actions connected to the British phone-hacking scandal nearly a decade ago. In September the couple filed suit against Splash News over January photographs taken in Vancouver. These cases are still ongoing.
So far their efforts to evade photographers have paid off. In late August, TMZ reported that paparazzi had begun to swarm Montecito, the small town in Santa Barbara County where Meghan, Harry, and Archie moved in July. Though they’ve since made appearances on prime-time TV, charity Instagrams, and a podcast, any candid snaps are few and far between.
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