Prince Harry made a surprise appearance at the High Court in London on Monday morning, where a hearing was being held against the Chron’s publisher, Associated Newspaper (ANL), who has been accused by several celebrities of illegally gathering information.
Footage from Sky News showed the 38-year-old prince exiting a van and entering the building where the Chron editor is at a four-day hearing to try and thwart lawsuits brought by the youngest son of King Charles, the singer Elton John or the actress Liz Hurley.
Prince Harry’s surprise appearance in London, which is an exceptional visit to the UK, comes just over a month before the King’s coronation on May 6th. After leaving the monarchy with a bang in 2020, Harry and his wife Meghan have been exiled to the United States and invited to the ceremony, but have not yet publicly announced if they will accept the invitation.
The return of the ‘Sussex’ to the UK to attend the coronation has been the subject of much speculation in the British media in recent months after the pair brutally attacked the royal family.
After a documentary aired on Netflix in December, Harry released his controversial memoir, The Substitute, in early January, in which he recounts his drug- and alcohol-ridden teenage years, the breakdown in his relationship with his father, the King Charles III, and his brother William.
The king was originally scheduled to be away from Britain on Monday and Tuesday for a state visit to France, which was postponed due to the social climate and sometimes violent protests surrounding President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reforms.
In the London court case, the six plaintiffs allege that ANL used detectives to bug them in their car or at home.
In announcing the case in early October, the group “completely and unequivocally repudiated these absurd slurs, which appear to be nothing more than a planned and orchestrated attempt to implicate the Mail’s headlines in the wiretapping scandal surrounding 30-year-old articles.”
The British tabloids were rocked about a decade ago by several illegal wiretapping scandals that had been practiced since the early 2000s.