Madonna is demanding £5 million from the Mail On Sunday after they published photos of her wedding to Guy Ritchie which had been deviously copied at her Beverly Hills home.
The Mail published photos of the Madonna/Ritchie wedding in early October as the couple began divorce proceedings. No photos of the 2000 wedding at Skibo Castle in Scotland had ever been previously released for public consumption - only photographer Jean-Baptiste Mondino took photos at the event, and the only copies of his pictures were given to the couple.
Madonna seemingly kept her wedding album at her Beverley Hills home. It's alleged that an interior designer working at the singer's property found the album and took photos of the photos. It was those that were sold to the Mail, who paid five grand for them.
Madonna sued for breach of privacy and copyright, her lawyer telling the court that the pictures of a "wholly private" event were copied and supplied "surreptitiously", and that the tabloid had "ambushed" his client by publishing the photos without first approaching her about them, because they knew if they did she'd seek an injunction to stop their publication.
The tabloid, for its part, seemingly hasn't denied the breach of privacy and copyright allegations, with Madonna's lawyer telling the court that the paper had made "no attempt to defend what it did". All of which means the paper presumably accepts it will have to pay the singer some damages in relation to its publication of the photos.
The big disagreement, however, will be how much. The High Court will consider appropriate damages in the New Year, but Madge's lawyers yesterday let it be known she is seeking £5 million. Such a sum would be unprecedented, and the Mail IS unlikely to offer anywhere near that sum in any out of court settlement, confident that the court, while possibly awarding Madonna substantial damages, would be more likely to order a sum in the tens or maybe hundreds of thousands, but certainly not millions.
The biggest payout between a celebrity and a newspaper was the estimated £1 million Elton John received from the Sun in 1987, but that was relating to a libel lawsuit. Pay outs and settlements in privacy cases tend to be lower - the recent privacy-based legal dispute between the News Of The World and Max Mosley resulted in record damages being paid to the Formula One chief, but that was just £60,000, dwarfed by Madonna's claim.
Responding to Madonna's damages claim, a spokesman for the Mail On Sunday told reporters: "These photographs were taken eight years ago, and at the time we published them copyright was not owned by Madonna. Their true commercial value today is indicated by the very modest sum we and other publications paid for them. The figure suggested by Madonna's lawyers is simply fantasy".