Prince Harry testifies in court about press hostility ‘since I was born’

As part of his declared mission to deter the tabloid media from its most intrusive excesses, Harry is suing the publisher of the Daily Mirror and two sister publications, alleging they penetrated his communications. His testimony and cross-examination are taking place over at least two days.

The Duke of Sussex, son of King Charles III and fifth in line to the throne, becomes the first high-ranking British royal to appear on the stand since 1891, when Edward VII, then Prince of Wales and later king, appeared as a witness (not a claimant like Harry) in a case involving alleged cheating during a game of cards. The “Royal Baccarat Scandal,” as the affair was called, gripped the nation with claims of betrayal in the aristocracy.

Prince Harry goes to court. Here’s what to know.

In his witness statement submitted Tuesday, Harry described to the High Court in London the steady campaign of press harassment from when he was a child. Harry said he and his wife moved to California “due to the constant intrusion, inciting of hatred and harassment by the tabloid press into every aspect of our private lives, which had a devastating impact on our mental health and well-being.” He added in the statement, “we were also very concerned for the security and safety of our son.”

His lawyer, David Sherborne, alleged the day before that no aspect of Harry’s youth was safe from press intrusion, aided by these “illegal means,” including the hacking of phones and voice mails. He denied that Harry has a “vendetta against the press” but added that the prince did want the tabloids held to account because the illegal activity happened on “an industrial scale.” As evidence, Harry’s lawyers submitted 148 newspaper articles that date from 1996 (when Harry was 11 years old) to 2010, that they claim arose from illegal snooping.

The drama is unfolding in Court 15 in the Rolls Building at London’s High Court — possibly the least cinematic setting possible for such an historic occasion: The ceilings are low, the lights fluorescent, the furniture is modern particle board.

The prince is dressed in a dark blue suit with a dark blue tie. He sits behind a computer screen that lets him review documents — mostly so far the articles that he is complaining about. He appears neither very defensive nor very assertive, but answers questions with repeated claims of hacking, which his side has not yet shown.

Andrew Green, the Mirror lawyer cross examining him, treats him with respect, but keeps scoring points. According to the BBC, Green has been described by former clients as a skilled and relentless cross-examiner “with a punchy and aggressive court style.”

His questions to the prince have focused again and again on whether the source of the articles about Harry are really from phone hacking, such as a 1996 piece saying the prince was taking his parents’ divorce badly. Green asked Harry if he was aware that his mother, Princess Diana, was already discussing with the press her children’s feelings about the divorce, and so this kind of information was already being freely circulated, some of it sourced to his mother.

Green then quizzed Harry about an article that the prince says was the result of phone hacking, which reported that Harry and his brother were going rock climbing instead of attending the Queen Mother’s 100th birthday celebration.

“The mere fact that someone has interest in you doesn’t mean they used unlawful measures,” Green said. The lawyer pointed out to Harry that two days earlier, Buckingham Palace confirmed their absence at the celebration. “There was no need for hacking, as the information had already been published,” Green said.

New York car chase highlights Prince Harry’s mission to change the media

Harry said in his witness statement that tabloids were responsible, in part, for his reckless behavior in the past.

“As a teenager and in my early twenties, I ended up feeling as though I was playing up to a lot of the headlines and stereotypes that they wanted to pin on me mainly because I thought that, if they are printing this rubbish about me and people were believing it, I may as well ‘do the crime,’ so to speak.”

Harry told the court that because burner phones were used to hack his communications “a lot of the evidence has been destroyed,” making it harder to draw a direct line between any one article and “unlawful information gathering,” as it is being called.

MGN — publisher of the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and People tabloids — says there is no evidence that Harry was the victim of phone hacking. And regardless, MGN says, some of the allegations have been brought too late.

On Monday, Green told the judge: “There’s no evidence to support a finding that any mobile phone owned or used by the Duke of Sussex was hacked. Zilch, zero, nil, de nada, niente, nothing.”

Traditionally the royal family, including Harry’s father, brother and stepmother, have followed the guidance of “never explain, never complain” when facing embarrassing revelations in the press.

Harry has broken that tradition.

When he married Meghan Markle, a biracial, divorced American actress, many Brits hoped the glamorous couple would help modernize the British monarchy.

But now, estranged from the royal family, Harry has said his mission in life is to change tabloid culture, which he says not only pollutes the lives of media consumers, but also contributed to his family rift.

Harry blames the tabloids for making life in Britain intolerable — and unsafe — for him and Meghan. Three weeks ago, a spokeswoman for the couple said “highly aggressive paparazzi” chased a vehicle transporting Harry, Meghan and Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, across New York City for two hours.

The prince says the tabloids contributed to the death of his mother, Diana, drove away former girlfriends and created the deep divisions between him and his brother and father.

In his memoir, “Spare,” Harry questions why the paparazzi who pursued his mother into a Paris tunnel in 1997 weren’t arrested. “Why were those paps not more roundly blamed?” he asks. “Who sent them? And why were they not in jail?”

The prince’s disgust with the media has been further fueled by what he calls targeted harassment, with racist overtones, in the coverage of his wife. The couple ended their lives as “senior working royals” in 2020 and moved to California. Harry returned for the coronation of his father, but Meghan stayed in the United States.

Defenders of the tabloids — and press freedom — say that the royal family is fair game and that stories about them — good and bad — satisfy the public interest and the public’s right to know about the monarchy, even the dirty bits.

In the court case, the tabloids will probably say they did not hack Harry’s phone, nor did they need to. They could get the same stories from sources happy to leak details about the prince. In Britain, tabloids have a long history of paying some sources for tips and information.

Critics of Harry and Meghan say the couple have profited from revealing intimate details of life in the House of Windsor, in their many interviews, in a six-hour, self-produced Netflix series and in Harry’s blockbuster memoir.

Mark Stephens, a media lawyer at the firm Howard Kennedy, said Harry’s side will push for an explanation of how certain stories ended up in the public domain, if not by illegal means. Stephens also expects the prince’s lawyers to point to invoices from private investigators that list specific news articles.

Matt Walsh, head of the journalism school at Cardiff University in Wales, said Harry is pursing a risky strategy, in the sense that the lawyers for the tabloids can point to many cases in which their scoops came the old-fashioned way, from palace leaks or family friends or other sources who witnessed or overheard information valuable to the newspapers.