Prince Harry will get his the long awaited day in court against Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids on Monday, as his lawsuit against News Group Newspapers for unlawful collection of private information finally goes to trial in London.
Harry himself is not expected to testify for at least the first two weeks of the trial, which will be devoted to “generic questions” relating to the newspaper’s practices from the 1990s to the early 2010s, when lawyers say their reporters routinely hacked the prince’s cellphones and cellphones. other celebrities to dig up intimate details.
The hearings, however, could prove damaging to Mr. Murdoch and several of his former lieutenants. Lawyers for Harry (40), the younger son of King Charles III, will try to show that News Group executives covered up and tried to destroy evidence of hacking and other inappropriate actions.
Harry is one of only two remaining prosecutors from an original group of about 40; the others, including actor Hugh Grant, settled with the News Group. Another plaintiff, also due to testify, is Tom Watson, the former deputy leader of the Labor Party, who claims the News Group hacked his phone and targeted him for political reasons.
Harry has so far rejected a settlement, casting the lawsuit as a last chance to hold the British press accountable for one of its darkest periods. In addition to phone hacking, tabloids hired private detectives and encouraged journalists to lie and impersonate themselves to gain access to highly personal information.
“One of the main reasons for ending this is the responsibility, because I’m the last person who can do it,” Harry said last month in interview at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit.
He acknowledged that no settlement may reimburse him for his legal fees, and that with News Group aggressively seeking to settle its remaining disputes out of court, it’s unclear whether any cases will follow his.
Nevertheless, the possibility of several days of testimony from the prince, who left Britain for southern California in part because, as he said, of the media’s relentless interference in his life, guarantees an attractive spectacle.
Harry has already testified once, in June 2023, in the hacking case against Mirror Group Newspapers. At the time, he was the first senior member of the royal family to testify in court since 1891, when Queen Victoria’s eldest son, Prince Albert Edward, testified about wrongdoing during a baccarat game he attended.
Timothy Fancourt, the judge in the 2023 case as well as the current one, ruled that Harry was the victim of “widespread and common hacking,” and awarded him 140,600 pounds, or $171,600. Harry settled the rest of his privacy claims against the Mirror Group for at least 400,000 pounds, or $488,000.
Lawyers involved in previous hacking cases said Harry took a risk by exposing himself to days of cross-examination. He cites 30 articles spanning the period from 1996 to 2011, some of which state that he is a regular drug user. His lawyer, David Sherborne, said that was not true.
If Harry continues to reject any settlement offer from News Group, under English law he is at risk of paying substantial legal costs if the court does not award him an adequate sum at the end of the trial. Although a last-minute settlement is still possible, lawyers said he appeared to have intended to make his allegations in open court.
“Harry seems to have come to terms with the fact that this is a price worth paying to get what he believes to be the truth,” said Daniel Taylor, a media lawyer in London who represented other former prosecutors in the case. “His overriding imperative is to bring the matter to trial to expose what he believes to be their outrageous wrongdoing.”
That in turn raises the stakes for Mr. Murdoch’s former associates. Among those who could come under unwanted surveillance is Will Lewisa former News executive who helped manage the company’s response to the hacking scandal in 2010 and 2011 and is currently publisher of The Washington Post.
Harry’s lawyers say that Mr. Lewis was part of a scheme to cover up evidence of hacking by removing files from the computer of Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News UK. The files were transferred to a USB drive that was either lost or could not be opened because it was encrypted, according to the complaint filed by prosecutors.
The News Group said Ms. Brooks was questioned about deleting the emails during her criminal trial in 2014 and was acquitted. Mr. Lewis was never charged. He later served as CEO of Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, before being named publisher of The Post in 2023.
“All allegations of wrongdoing are untrue,” said Mr. Lewis ua statement to The New York Times last June. “I have no further comment.”
News Group lawyers say Harry is trying to turn the trial into a wider public inquiry into phone hacking. In May, Judge Fancourt rejected an attempt by Harry’s lawyers to bring Mr Murdoch into the case, saying: “There is a desire on the part of the litigants to shoot ‘trophy’ targets, whether they are political issues or high-profile individuals.”
Mr Murdoch, who is 93, testified before the British Parliament in 2011 that he should not be personally responsible for the hacking, given that he ran a global company with 53,000 employees. But he shut down the News of the World, the tabloid most closely associated with the hack, and issued a contrite apology.
For Harry, Mr. Murdoch remained the archnemesis. Harry and his older brother William have long held their tabloids, among others, responsible for the death of their mother Diana, Princess of Wales, who died in a car crash in Paris in 1997 while being followed by photographers.
In his memoirs, “Spare”, Harry described Mr Murdoch’s politics as “just to the right of the Taliban”.
“I didn’t like the evil he did to the Truth every day, his wanton desecration of objective facts,” Harry wrote. “I couldn’t think of a single human being in the 300,000-year history of the species that has done more damage to our collective sense of reality.”
