LONDON – Prince Harry entered a London courtroom in a high-risk attempt to prove the editor of the Daily Mirror tabloid had unlawfully snooped on his life.
He left the witness stand on Wednesday looking exhausted and with an uncertain outcome.
The Duke of Sussex said he was highly suspicious of the way reporters obtained information about him for stories from 1996 to 2011 that had caused him grief, but he had little basis for his allegations. He said journalists used burner phones and destroyed recordings, citing evidence from other cases.
“I believe that phone hacking was occurring on an industrial scale in at least three newspapers at this point,” he claimed in his second Supreme Court testimony. “There’s no doubt about that.”
At the end of the nearly eight-hour cross-examination over two days, defense attorney Andrew Green asked if Harry knew of any evidence his phone had been hacked over a 15-year period.
“No,” said Harry. “It’s one of the reasons I’m here.”
Harry is on a mission to reform Britain’s media and allegations of phone hacking are at the heart of his legal battles with publishers.
The case against Mirror Group Newspapers, which has paid more than £100m ($125m) to settle hundreds of wrongful information gathering claims, is the first of its three hacking claims to go to court. He says tabloid publishers invaded his privacy by bugging voicemails and hiring private investigators to cover the smallest details of his life, leaving him in great emotional turmoil.
Harry’s hostility towards the British media runs through his memoir, Spare. He blames paparazzi for the car crash that killed his mother, Princess Diana, and he said intrusion by journalists prompted him and his wife Meghan to flee to the US in 2020 and leave royal life behind to let yourself
His lawyer said he was not seeking revenge against the media but was seeking accountability, although Harry’s 55-page testimony suggested otherwise.
“How much more blood will stain their typing fingers before anyone can put an end to this madness?” he wrote.
But his composure in court showed none of that sharpness.
He spoke softly and did not lose patience, as witnesses under cross-examination often do – even when he was repeatedly asked to explain how an article had caused him pain when he was not sure he had read it at the time of publication.
“Most of the items I don’t remember seeing,” he said. “Most of them were just as troubling then and even more troubling now as I went through this process.”
The spectacle, which saw the first senior member of the royal family to testify in court in more than 130 years, drew dozens of reporters, photographers and curious onlookers lucky enough to get a seat.
Both days he wore a dark suit and a white shirt, sometimes smiling, sometimes joking and sometimes laughing.
He drew laughter from about two dozen reporters on Tuesday when he dismissed a longtime royal family correspondent as someone he wouldn’t call a “specialist.”
While juggling various large binders containing articles about him, he quipped, “I feel like I’m working out.”
Someone on the gallery sneezed in the middle of the testimony, and he said, “Thank God,” without slowing his pace.
Mirror Group lawyer Andrew Green, known for his brutal cross-examination, was respectful but direct in attempting to refute Harry’s allegations.
Green asked Harry if he really believed journalists were stupid enough to risk being caught hacking phones after a News of the World reporter and a private investigator were jailed for such activities in 2007.
“I think the risk is worth the reward for her,” Harry replied.
Green, who has claimed Harry’s phone wasn’t hacked, asked the witness if he would be relieved or upset if the judge came to the same conclusion.
“To make a decision against me… given that the Mirror Group admitted to hacking, it would feel like an injustice,” Harry replied.
“So you want your phone hacked?” Green said.
“No one wants to be hacked,” Harry replied.
Judge Timothy Fancourt, who will deliver the verdict later this year, asked how long Harry had been noticing unusual activity on his phone, which he later blamed on hacking.
“From the moment I had a cellphone. … It never stopped,” Harry said. “I remember lots of missed calls that lasted a second, I remember lots of people asking me, ‘Did you get my voicemail?'”
Harry’s skepticism about the press included the suspicion that anonymous sources were being invented and extended to include individuals quoted by name.
More than once, he said that seeing something in print attributed to someone “doesn’t mean it’s true,” and that false information was added to the stories “to throw people like me off balance.” “.
When Harry could not prove how information about him had been improperly obtained, he asked Green to question the story’s reporter.
His own lawyer, David Sherborne, later got that chance when he questioned former Daily Mirror royal correspondent Jane Kerr, whose author appears in several of the 33 stories cited in Harry’s lawsuit.
The lawyer expressed disbelief as she said she never thought that private investigators paid by the newspaper to search for unlisted phone numbers and other information on individuals would be breaking the law.
“I don’t recall ever directing anyone to do anything illegal or knowing they did anything illegal,” Kerr said.
In testimony, Kerr said the Mirror Group admitted directing an investigator, Jonathan Stafford, to unlawfully obtain private information and that her name appeared in records about him.
“I had no reason to believe that the practices engaged in by Stafford were unlawful, nor did I direct him to engage in such practices,” she said.
At the end of Harry’s testimony, his own attorney had an opportunity to ask questions and finally asked how he was doing after a day and a half on the stand.
“They had to go through these articles and answer questions, knowing full well that this is a very public courtroom and the world’s media is watching. How did that make you feel?” Sherborne said.
Harry seemed to choke. He took a deep breath and puffed out his cheeks as he exhaled.
“That’s a lot,” he said, smiling tiredly.