When the French magazine ran photos of the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, appearing topless violated the strict French privacy laws, speculating to have taken the risk to increase sales, experts say, according to the Guardian.
French privacy laws are considered to be amongst the strictest in the world, protecting high profile individuals, with top politicians constantly using courts to block the publication of scandalous photos that would be considered harmless by the standards of other countries tabloids.
Thomas Roussineau, a specialist in privacy law, says the French publication Closer had without a doubt violated their country’s privacy laws by publishing images of Middleton on holiday in the South of France.
"It is totally forbidden," he said. "The castle is not the street, it is in a private place, and they are intimate pictures."
But he was very clear that the publication has considered the potential cost of a fine versus the financial gain the topless photos of the duchess would generate for them.
"They will have a big revenue, and the amount of the sentence will not equal the revenue they will make, it will be a very small part of the revenue they will have from these pictures," Roussineau explained.
The magazine’s editor-in-chief stood behind her decision to run the photos. Laurence Pieau spoke of the photos as a “beautiful series” that displayed the royal couple in love, and were in no manner degrading.
Pieau added that they had more intimate photos from the series taken of them, but decided not to publish those, according to the Guardian.
"There's been an over-reaction to these photos,” she told French BFM television. “What we see is a young couple, who just got married, who are very much in love, who are splendid. She's a real 21st century princess. It's a young woman who is topless, the same as you can see on any beach in France or around the world."
Meanwhile, the U.K. edition of Closer has greatly distanced themselves from the French edition and confirmed they would never publish the photos.
They even issued their own public statement: "Closer magazine U.K. is published by Bauer Consumer Media. The French edition meanwhile is published under a license by a totally different company, an Italian business called Mondadori."
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