French court orders magazine to pay €100,000 in damages over topless pictures of Kate Middleton
The grainy snaps of Kate Middleton sunbathing in a bikini bottom were taken while she was on holiday in September 2012
Photographs of a topless Duchess of Cambridge taken by paparazzi while she was on holiday in France were an invasion of privacy, a court has ruled.
Just 24 hours after news that the Kate and Prince William were expecting their third child, the couple were back in the news when the court in Nanterre, west of Paris, delivered its verdict on the five-year-old case.
The court awarded the royal couple €100,000 (US$119,000) in damages and interests and ordered the editor and owner of the glossy magazine Closer to pay the maximum fine of €45,000 each. The awards, while high for a French court, wre considerably lower than the €1.5 million the couple’s legal team had demanded.
Six people, including three photographers, were tried earlier this year after long-lens pictures of the couple on holiday in France were published in the French celebrity magazine and a local newspaper, La Provence.
The photographs were taken in the summer of 2012 and show the royal couple on a terrace by a swimming pool at a private chateau owned by Viscount Linley, the queen’s nephew, in the Luberon, Provence.
Splashed across the cover of Closer under the headline “Oh My God (in English): the photos that will go around the world”, the photos show the duchess wearing only the bottom half of her bikini. There were more topless photographs on the inside pages.