According to The Guardian, Piers Morgan threatened to sue Earl Spencer and his publisher over a claim in the new Princess Diana memoir Swan Song that Morgan published intrusive photos of Diana, the same week the book hits shelves. The book also alleges King Charles told Spencer that Diana would soon be forgotten.
Morgan's defense has the precision of a man who has been waiting three decades for this. The photographs, he says, were printed by The Sunday Mirror in November 1993. He joined The Daily Mirror in October 1995. At the time of the gym pictures he was actually doing a showbiz column for The Sun. The most meticulously researched celebrity defense of the decade is about which tabloid he worked for, and it is a defense built around a photo of a woman someone else printed.
Then the ask. Here is the good part. He does not want money. He wants the "complete lie" removed from the book and a donation made to the King's Trust. A defamation threat whose settlement goes to the King's charity. Even his lawsuit is being polite to the Crown.
That is the mechanism. The book lands, the threat gets a talk show with millions of viewers, and suddenly the publisher is named in every headline. The recall is the news. The lawsuit is the ad. "Why should we believe anything else that he puts in this book?" is the best one sentence of marketing this memoir will ever get, delivered by the most famous tabloid editor in the country, for free.
Even Buckingham Palace is running a non-denial now. "The pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory." The monarchy managing a phone call from 1997 with a press release. Everything in this story is a press release, including the lawsuit, including the grief.
YOUR TURN: Is demanding a charity donation the most Piers move ever made, or the smartest legal threat of the year?
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