Prince Harry’s lawsuit alleging phone hacking at the Daily Mail begins a mammoth nine-week trial on Monday, with mega sums in cash as well as reputation on the line.
The Duke of Sussex and co-claimants, including Sir Elton John, actor Elizabeth Hurley and racial justice campaigner Baroness Doreen Lawrence, allege that Associated Newspapers (ANL), publisher of the Mail titles, systematically engaged in “unlawful information gathering” between 1993 and 2011.
Harry will need to testify, his second outing in the witness box at the High Court after a historic spell of live evidence in a similar case he fought and won against Mirror Group Newspapers in December 2023. No date for this has been set yet.
Why It Matters
Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, have sued the Mail titles four times, more than any other news organization. In one of those cases, Markle’s lawsuit over a private letter she sent to her father, they sought to put the Mail‘s journalism as a whole on trial via allegations of systemic bias.
The duchess won the case but was denied the full public spectacle she had been seeking after a judge quashed aspects of her argument that used nine Mail news stories to allege an “obvious agenda of publishing intrusive or offensive stories about [Markle] intended to portray her in a false and damaging light.”
Out of 10 cases the couple filed between 2019 and 2022, the current lawsuit is the final one, but it is the only other case that comes close to the stakes of the private letter suit. In other words, it proved Harry’s last chance, alongside the other public figures involved, to establish in court a broad spectrum attack on the Mail and its sister titles.
Meanwhile, the legal bill racked up by the two sides was spiraling toward £38.8 million (about $52 million), and so was capped in January 2025 at around £4 million for Harry and his co-claimants and £4.5 million for the Mail. Even at the lower amount, that is a substantial sum for Harry and the other claimants to pay if they lose.
What to Know
A court filing by Harry’s lawyers, seen by Newsweekreads: “Associated widely and habitually carried out or commissioned illegal or unlawful information gathering activities for the purposes of obtaining, preparing or furthering the publication of articles in its newspapers, the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sundaysome of which were reproduced in the Mail Online.”
It continues, “[Prince Harry] will contend that the use of these Unlawful Acts was both habitual and widespread across Associated’s newspapers during the period at least 1993 onwards to 2011 and even continued beyond until 2018.”
The most eye-catching allegations in the case threaten significant reputational damage to the Mail if proven, including phone hacking, live wire tapping and even burglary.
Some of those may be harder to prove, but other allegations, including a practice known as blagging, may be more straightforward.
Blagging is a British slang term for gaining access by deception. Casual use of the phrase can be fairly benign, such as a person tricking their way into the VIP area of a nightclub. Harry’s allegations, though, reflect more serious privacy violations.
For example, the prince has accused private detectives of obtaining flight records for his ex-girlfriend, Chelsy Davy, so the photographers could ambush her at the airport on arrival.
A filing states that Mail journalists hired a freelance journalist “repeatedly to obtain private information about [Prince Harry] and
Ms Chelsy for the purposes of writing stories about them throughout the period 2005 to 2011, including for unlawful searches of private flight details for Ms Davy who was travelling between South Africa and the UK in April 2006 in order to visit the [Prince Harry].”
What the Daily Mail Says
As early as October 2022, when the case was filed, Associated Newspapers came out fighting. A statement read: “We utterly and unambiguously refute these preposterous smears which appear to be nothing more than a pre-planned and orchestrated attempt to drag the Mail titles into the phone hacking scandal concerning articles up to 30 years old.
“These unsubstantiated and highly defamatory claims—based on no credible evidence—appear to be simply a fishing expedition by claimants and their lawyers, some of whom have already pursued cases elsewhere.”
Lawyers for the tabloid sought, unsuccessfully, to have the case thrown out at an early stage in part due to the chaos surrounding the evidence of a private detective, Gavin Burrows.
Burrows was initially said to have turned supergrass, going from working for the Mail to making wide-ranging allegations against it to the prince’s lawyers in a 2021 statement. However, he later said his signature on the statement was forged and denied working for the newspapers.
A newer statement reported by the BBC in November read: “I do not recognise the earlier witness statement of August 16, 2021 and I believe that my signature on that document is a forgery. A lot of it is not written in my type of language.”
“Further, the contents of the statement are substantially untrue,” he added, clarifying that his only work for Associated was a story about Virgin tycoon Sir Richard Branson that “did not involve any illegal activity.”
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