The Sun newspaper on Saturday published an apology to Meghan Markle on its front page and said it realised that “with free expression comes responsibility.”
The statement by The Sun newspaper followed a ruling on Friday by the UK press regulator IPSO that an opinion piece about the Duchess of Sussex published in December 2022 was sexist in its tone.
25,000 people complained to regulator IPSO after a column by Grand Tour star Jeremy Clarkson appeared in The Sun newspaper, in which he wrote about Meghan Markle being paraded naked in the street.
IPSO chairman Lord Faulks said the article was “humiliating and degrading towards the duchess.”
The regulator rejected complaints that the article was racist in tone, inaccurate or sought to harass the duchess.
After the article was published last year, Prince Harry and Meghan accused the writer of “spreading hate rhetoric, dangerous conspiracy theories and misogyny.” The article was removed from the paper’s website and Clarkson apologised.
Clarkson had written that he was “dreaming of the day when [Meghan] is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her”.
He later clarified that he had been making a reference to a scene in Game of Thrones, but had omitted to mention the name of the TV drama in his haste to meet his press deadline.