Prince Harry’s lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids is set to begin in the UK

Prince Harry will have it The long-awaited day in court A British court filed a lawsuit against British tabloids owned by Rupert Murdoch on Monday, at a time when his lawsuit against News Group newspapers on charges of illegally collecting private information will finally begin in London.

Harry himself is not expected to take the side during at least the first two weeks of the trial, which will be devoted to “general issues” relating to the tabloids’ practices from the 1990s to early 2010, when lawyers routinely told their reporters they hacked into the prince’s mobile phone and the phones of other celebrities to search for intimate details. .

However, the hearings could hurt Mr. Murdoch and many of his former aides. Lawyers for Harry, 40, the youngest son of King Charles III, will seek to show that News Group executives concealed and sought to destroy evidence of hacking and other improper practices.

Harry is one of only two remaining plaintiffs from the original group of about 40 people; The rest, including actor Hugh Grant, settled with the News Group. The other plaintiff, who is also due to stand trial, is Tom Watson, the former deputy leader of the Labor Party, who claims News Group hacked his phone and targeted him for political reasons.

Harry has so far refused to settle, considering his lawsuit a final opportunity to hold the British press accountable in one of its darkest periods. In addition to phone hacking, tabloids hired private investigators and encouraged journalists to lie and misrepresent themselves to access highly personal data.

“One of the main reasons to achieve this is accountability, because I am the last person who can actually achieve this,” Harry said last month in a speech. interview At the New York Times DealBook Summit.

He acknowledged that any settlement may not compensate him for his legal costs, and that with News Group aggressively seeking to settle the remaining lawsuits out of court, it was unclear whether any lawsuits would follow his case.

However, the prospect of several days of testimony by the prince, who left Britain for Southern California partly because of what he said was constant press interference in his life, ensures an interesting spectacle.

Harry has testified once before, in June 2023, in a hacking case against Mirror Group newspapers. At the time, he was the first senior member of the royal family to stand trial since 1891, when Queen Victoria’s eldest son, Prince Albert Edward, testified about wrongdoing during a gambling game at which he was present.

Timothy Fancourt, the judge in the 2023 case as well as the current case, ruled that Harry was a victim “Hacking is widespread and common“It awarded him 140,600 pounds, or $171,600. Harry settled the remainder 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 was risking several days of interrogation. He cites 30 articles covering the period from 1996 to 2011, some of which assert that 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, then under English law he will be at risk of paying significant legal costs if the court does not award him a proportionate sum at the end of the trial. While a last-minute settlement could still be reached, lawyers said he appears intent on revealing his accusations in open court.

“Harry appears to have convinced himself that this is a price worth paying to get to what he believes is the truth,” said Daniel Taylor, a media lawyer in London who represented other former plaintiffs in the case. “The most important thing for him is to take the matter to court in order to expose what he believes is their terrible mistake.”

This in turn raises the stakes for Murdoch’s former associates. Among those who could be subject to unwelcome scrutiny is him Will Lewisa former News executive who helped manage the company’s response to the hacking scandal in 2010 and 2011, is currently the publisher of The Washington Post.

Harry’s lawyers say Lewis was part of a scheme to hide evidence of hacking by removing files from a computer belonging to News UK chief executive Rebecca Brooks. The files were transferred to a USB drive that was either lost or not. It was unlocked because it was encrypted, according to the complaint filed by plaintiffs.

Ms Brooks was questioned about deleting emails during her criminal trial in 2014, and was acquitted of the charges, News Group said. Mr. Lewis was never charged. He later became CEO of Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, before being named publisher of The Post in 2023.

“Any allegations of wrongdoing are false,” Mr. Lewis said in a letter. Statement to the New York Times Last June. “I have no further comment to make.”

News Group’s lawyers say Harry is trying to turn the trial into a broader public investigation into phone hacking. In May, Judge Fancourt rejected an attempt by Harry’s lawyers to draw Murdoch into the case, saying: “There is a desire on the part of those conducting the plaintiffs’ litigation to shoot at the ‘trophies’ targets, whatever those may be.” These are political issues or prominent individuals.

Murdoch, 93, testified before the British Parliament in 2011 that he should not be held personally liable for the hacking, given that he ran a global company with 53,000 employees. But he closed the News of the World, the tabloid most closely associated with piracy, and issued a contrite apology.

For Harry, Murdoch remained a formidable enemy. Harry and his older brother William have long held their tabloids responsible, among other things, for the death of their mother Diana, Princess of Wales, who was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997 while pursued by paparazzi.

In his diaryadditionalHarry described Mr Murdoch’s policy as “straight to the right of the Taliban”.

“I did not like the damage he did every day to the truth, his willful desecration of objective facts,” Harry wrote. “I can’t think of a single human in the 300,000-year history of this species who has done more damage to our collective sense of reality.”