Britain's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, leaves the High Court in London, on March 28.HANNAH MCKAY/Reuters
Prince Harry’s long and acrimonious battle against Britain’s tabloid newspapers will intensify on Tuesday when he testifies in a London courtroom to outline his many grievances.
It’s rare for members of the Royal Family to show up in a court let alone subject themselves to the vagaries of the witness box. The Duke of Sussex’s appearance will mark the first time this has happened since 1890 when the Prince of Wales, who later became King Edward VII, testified in a slander case involving allegations that one of his friends cheated in a card game.
Prince Harry has never hidden his contempt for tabloid journalism. He’s blamed relentless reporting for the death of his mother, Diana, and said that harassment by the press caused him and his wife, the Duchess of Sussex, to break with the Royal Family. During many television interviews and in his book, Spare, the Duke has referred to journalists as ruthless, toxic, sadists, dweebs, bullies and the devil. And he has vowed that his life’s mission is to reform “the media landscape in the U.K.”
“Changing the media,” he told ITV in January of his goal, “who I believe is at the epicentre of so many problems across the U.K. where people are suffering.”
In pursuit of that purpose, Prince Harry has launched four lawsuits in Britain against some of the country’s largest media companies, including the publishers of the Daily Mirror, the Daily Mail and The Sun.
On Tuesday, he will take to the witness box in a case involving Mirror Group Newspapers and allegations of phone hacking. In court filings, Prince Harry alleges that staff at MGN, which publishes the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People, hacked into telephones, bugged homes and used deception to illegally acquire personal information.
He’s among more than 100 celebrities who have filed civil claims against the company but only four cases – Harry’s and three others – have been selected as representative claims. A joint trial began last month and each claim is being heard separately during the seven-week proceeding, starting with Prince Harry’s which began Monday.
In his opening statement, the Prince’s lawyer, David Sherborne, alleged that phone hacking occurred on “an industrial scale” between 1996 and 2011, and led to hundreds of stories about Harry. “Nothing was sacrosanct and out of bounds; there was no protection from these unlawful methods,” Mr. Sherborne said.
MGN’s lawyer Andrew Green retorted that Prince Harry had not proven his case. “There is simply no evidence capable of supporting the finding that the Duke of Sussex was hacked, still less on a habitual basis,” Mr. Green said in his opening remarks.
Prince Harry’s decision to testify is fraught with challenges, and he’s already off to a bad start.
The Duke irritated the judge, Timothy Fancourt, by failing to show up on Monday. Justice Fancourt wanted Harry to be there in case there was time for his testimony to begin after opening statements.
Mr. Sherborne said the Duke had flown in from Los Angles on Sunday after his daughter’s birthday and that security arrangements had held him up. “It was never anticipated that the openings would not take the whole day,” he added.
Justice Fancourt shot back: “It was anticipated that they might – which is why I directed that the first witness should be available.”
Prince Harry can also expect intense cross-examination by Mr. Green, who is likely to probe the details of various stories and press his case that the information could have come from other sources.
“The defence is going to try and drag all the dirt,” said Pauline Maclaran, a professor at Royal Holloway University in London who co-authored a book about consumer culture and the Royal Family. Prof. Maclaran said Prince Harry could still be seen as a hero to many young people if it looks like he’s standing up to institutions that have checkered histories when it comes to reporting on the Royal Family.
The Duke’s case has already dragged up the phone hacking scandal that rocked the British media in 2006. Revelations of widespread illegal information gathering by reporters led to a public inquiry, a handful of criminal convictions and the closing of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World newspaper in 2011.
Mr. Murdoch’s News Group as well as MGN and other companies have paid more than £100-million in total to settle claims from hundreds of celebrities who were victims of hacking. Prince Harry said in court filings that his brother, the Prince of Wales, settled his case in 2020 “for a huge sum of money.”
Lawyers for MGN have acknowledged that one Sunday People story about Harry in 2004 relied on illegally obtained information from an outside party. However, MGN has denied the Duke’s other allegations and argued that he waited too long to file his lawsuit.