Prince Harry will buy it the long awaited day in court On Monday, Rupert Murdoch's lawsuit against British tabloids, News Group Newspapers, over the illegal collection of personal data finally went to trial in London.
Harry himself is not expected to take the stand for at least the first two weeks of the trial, which will be devoted to “general issues” about the documents' practices from the 1990s to the early 2010s. hacked the prince's and other celebrities' mobile phones to find out intimate details.
However, the hearings could be damaging to Mr. Murdoch and several of his former lieutenants. Lawyers for Harry, 40, the youngest son of King Charles III, will set out to show that Newsgroup bosses hid and tried to destroy evidence of hacking and other inappropriate practices.
Harry is one of two remaining contenders from the original group of about 40; the rest, including actor Hugh Grant, agreed with the News Group. Another plaintiff also scheduled to take the stand is former Labor deputy leader Tom Watson, who claims News Group hacked his phone and targeted him for political reasons.
Harry has so far refused to agree, giving his suit as a last chance to come to terms with one of the darkest periods of the British press. In addition to hacking phones, tabloids hired private detectives and encouraged journalists to lie and misrepresent themselves in order to gain access to highly personal information.
“One of the main reasons for seeing it is accountability, because I'm the last person who can actually achieve it,” Harry said last month. interview At the New York Times' DealBook Summit.
He acknowledged that any settlement would not cover his legal costs and that News Group is aggressively seeking to settle the remaining lawsuit out of court, though it is unclear if any will follow.
Still, the prospect of a prince leaving Britain for Southern California to testify for several days because of the relentless press intrusion into his life warrants an amazing spectacle.
Harry has testified once before, 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 stand trial after testifying about wrongdoing during a baccarat game involving Queen Victoria's eldest son, Prince Albert Edward, in 1891.
Timothy Fancourt, the judge in the case in 2023 and the present, ruled that Harry was a “victim”.widespread and common hacking,” and awarded him 140,600 pounds, or $171,600. Harry settled the remaining privacy claims against the Mirror Group for at least £400,000, or $488,000.
Lawyers involved in previous hacking cases said Harry took a risk by subjecting himself to several days of cross-examination. He cites 30 articles spanning 1996-2011, some of which allege he was a regular drug user. His lawyer, David Sherborne, said that was not true.
If Harry continues to reject any settlement offer from News Group, he risks paying significant legal costs under English law if the court does not award him a proportionate sum at the end of the proceedings. Although a last-minute deal is still possible, attorneys said they intend to make the allegations in open court.
“Harry seems to have come to terms with the fact that this is a price worth paying to get to what he believes to be the truth,” said media lawyer Daniel Taylor, who represents other former plaintiffs in the case in London. “His primary duty is to litigate the matter to expose what he believes to be their gross wrongdoing.”
This, in turn, raises the stakes for Mr Murdoch's former associates. Among those subjected to unwanted scrutiny Will LewisA former News executive who helped lead the company's response to the hacking scandal in 2010 and 2011, he is now publisher of The Washington Post.
Harry's lawyers say Mr Lewis was part of a plan to hide evidence of the hack by deleting files from a computer belonging to News UK chief executive Rebekah Brooks. It was opened because it was encrypted, according to the plaintiffs' complaint.
Ms. Brooks was questioned and cleared of the charges during a 2014 criminal trial for deleting emails, the News Group said. Mr. Lewis was never charged. He later became chief executive of Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, before being named publisher of The Post in 2023.
In his speech, Mr Lewis said: “Any allegation of wrongdoing is untrue Statement to The New York Times last June. “I have no further comment.”
News Group's lawyers argue that Harry is trying to turn the trial into a wider public inquiry into phone hacking. In May, Judge Fancourt rejected a bid by Harry's lawyers to bring Mr. Murdoch into the case, saying: “There is a desire on the part of the plaintiffs to shoot at the litigants, whether trophy targets. political issues or high-profile individuals”.
Mr Murdoch, 93, testified before the British Parliament in 2011 that he should not be held personally responsible for the hacking given that he heads 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 an apology.
Mr. Murdoch remained Harry's archenemy. Harry and his older brother William have long blamed the tabloids, among others, for the death of their mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, who was killed in a 1997 car crash while being chased by photographers in Paris.
In his memoirs, “ReserveHarry described Mr Murdoch's politics as “to the right of the Taliban”.
“I didn't like his daily damage to Truth, insulting objective facts,” Harry wrote. “I can't think of a single person in the 300,000-year history of the species that has done more damage to our collective sense of reality.”