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Prince Harry wins major lawsuit, UK tabloid found guilty of hacking his phone
Prince Harry has scored a major win in a lawsuit where Mirror Group Newspapers has been found guilty of hacking the royal's phone. Read more below.
A London Court on Friday, December 15, 2023, ruled a decision in favour of Prince Harry in a lawsuit he has pursued against a British tabloid publisher, Mirror Group Newspapers.
Prince Harry wins the lawsuit
Judge, Timothy Fancourt found shocking proof that the publisher had adopted unlawful information-gathering practices, including phone hacking, in its coverage of the prince.
In his ruling, he stated that the information in 15 out of the 33 articles submitted by Harry's lawyers as evidence of phone hacking had been unlawfully gathered by journalists. Therefore, he awarded the royal some 140,600 pounds, or around $180,000 in damages.
The timeline during which Harry's personal phone was targeted was said to be between 2004 and 2009.
In the lawsuit, Harry had alleged that journalists from The Mirror, The Sunday Mirror and The Sunday People tabloids targeted him and those part of his inner circle by gaining access to his voicemails and using other unlawful methods over the years, causing him “considerable distress.”
Most of the actions outlined in the case occurred from 1991 to 2011, at a time when Harry was third in line to the British throne, behind his father and elder brother, William.
In his testimony, the prince said that the negative coverage of his life and his family on the front pages of other newspapers led him to distrust even his closest friends. In the written evidence, he declared that these editors and journalists had “blood on their hands” because of the methods they used and the lengths they went to report on him and his family.
Stories covered by the tabloid…
Out of the many stories covered through the years, the prince recalled one written when he was in elementary school, that revealed distressing and damaging personal details, one including hum breaking his thumb at school.
“Not only do I have no idea how they would know that, but those sorts of things instil paranoia in a young man,” he said.
Others were regarding his relationship with former girlfriend Chelsy Davy, whom he dated after school. The prince said that at one point the pair had found a tracking device on her car.
This lawsuit, a civil matter, is just one of the many cases the royal couple, Harry and Meghan have filed against Britain's tabloid news media over privacy rights.
