X17 will also pay a portion of the family’s legal fees, according to Mr. Kump.
In blunt terms, Harry and Meghan, who have clashed repeatedly with the British news media over privacy concerns, sent a stark message to American paparazzi agencies with the case: You come after us, and we will come after you.
“We apologize to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and their son for the distress we have caused,” X17 said in a statement. “We were wrong to offer these photographs and commit to not doing so again.”
Mr. Kump said in a statement, “All families have a right, protected by law, to feel safe and secure at home.”
The couple, who resettled in California this year after a dramatic decampment from the House of Windsor, sued under a so-called paparazzi law, by which a person can be held liable civilly for intruding airspace to take photographs of a person on private property. The law was enacted in 1998 and last updated in 2015. It also covers wild driving by celebrity photographers while stalking their subjects — the kind of behavior that bedeviled Harry’s mother, Princess Diana, who died in 1997 after her sedan crashed while trying to escape paparazzi on motorcycles.
Harry and Meghan — beloved by millions of fans, who see them as daring and modern, and vilified by an equally vehement faction that sees their tradition-spurning actions as unbecoming — have taken an unusually hard-line approach with the tabloid news media. In April, complaining of “an economy of click bait and distortion” and coverage that was “distorted, false and invasive beyond reason,” they told four leading British tabloid publishers that they would no longer deal with them. Meghan has sued the publisher of The Mail on Sunday, the sister paper of The Daily Mail, for publishing a private letter that she had sent to her estranged father in 2018. Another lawsuit, aimed at Splash News, involves photographs that were taken of Meghan and Archie this year in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/business/harry-meghan-paparazzi-lawsuit.html
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