Prince Harry resumed his indictment of the tabloids accused of having engaged in “industrial-scale” phone tapping in the past during the trial of a tabloid in London on Wednesday.
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This statement by the 38-year-old prince is the first appearance by a member of the royal family on the witness stand since that of the future Edward VII in 1891 before a libel trial.
Charles III’s youngest son, who is at odds with the royal family, has had several legal battles against the tabloids. He accuses him of being responsible for the death of his mother Diana, who was being pursued by paparazzi in Paris in 1997. He also accuses him of bullying what he calls Meghan and taking responsibility for his poor relationship with his family.
In the ongoing trial, which began last month, Harry accuses the publisher of the Daily Mirror newspaper of using illegal intelligence-gathering methods, including hacking telephone mailboxes, between 1996 and 2010.
“Phone hacking was being practiced on an industrial scale by at least three newspapers at the time and there is no doubt about that,” the Duke of Sussex said on Wednesday morning.
If the court did not recognize this, Harry would “feel a certain injustice”.
But if the newspaper “Mirror Group Newspapers” (MGN) has already apologized for its practices at the time, the prince has to convince the judge in this process that illegal information gathering was present in the 33 articles brought to the process.
At times he seemed hesitant about the details, on Tuesday at the start of his questioning by the press group’s impressive lawyer. On the other hand, he more generally described the intrusion of the tabloids into his life from an early age and his suffering and even his “paranoia” at the articles published about him.
He denounced the “despicable” practices of certain newspapers, as he did in a documentary on Netflix in December and in his memoir Le Suppléant, released in January.
speculation
On Wednesday morning, Andrew Green, the solicitor for MGN – which publishes the Sunday Mirror and the Sunday People alongside the Daily Mirror – continued to question the prince at length about the disputed articles and asked for evidence of the illegal practices.
The first mention, published in 2005, revealed that Harry, then a cadet in the Army, had been relieved “of walking five miles a day” due to a knee injury.
The article also claimed the prince spent “15 minutes a day” writing emails to his girlfriend from a computer lab at Sandhurst, the military academy where he was located. “I don’t see how anyone could have known,” the prince said when the lawyer asked him if he believed the information came from illegal intelligence gathering.
When the lawyer later points out that hacking Harry’s phone would have been “a huge risk” for the journalists, the prince replies without hesitation that for them “the reward was worth the risk”.
For Andrew Green, Harry’s allegations of hacking his voicemail are speculative. “Not at all, I don’t agree,” responds the prince.
Exiled to California with his wife Meghan, the prince is still at odds with the rest of the British royal family.
Her previous appearance in the UK dates back to her turbulent journey to her father’s coronation on May 6th.
He kept his distance from his father and his brother, the heir to the throne Wilhelm, both of whom were burned into his memories. No family reunion is expected during this stay.