Prince Harry, in dramatic testimony, says journalists have ‘blood on their hands’

Prince Harry finally got his day in court against the British tabloid press he has long vilified, taking the stand in London on Tuesday to accuse the Mirror Newspaper Group of hacking into his mobile phone more than a decade ago.

During five hours of polite but persistent whining, Harry persisted in his claims that the Mirror Group reporters intercepted his voicemail messages and used other illegal means to dig up personal information about him, creating an atmosphere of distrust and even paranoia that has haunted him ever since. shadowed. youth.

It was a spectacle that was both extraordinary and ordinary: Harry, 38, the second son of King Charles III and the first prominent royal to testify in more than a century, stated that editors and journalists “have blood on their hands” because of the effort they go to where they went to track down news of him and his family, not least his mother, Diana, who died in a car accident in 1997 after being chased by photographers.

But as famous as the prosecution was, the scene in the packed Supreme Court took on the rhythm of every other legal proceeding as Harry’s cross-examination began. A lawyer for the Mirror Group, Andrew Green, repeatedly pressed him for hard evidence that his journalists had hacked into his phone. Much of the information Harry said was obtained illegally was available from other sources, the lawyer argued.

Harry, speaking in a modulated and measured tone, insisted that there was no way the Mirror’s reporters could have discovered his whereabouts or the details of a schoolyard injury so quickly without resorting to illegal methods.

“Aren’t we in the realm of total speculation?” Mr Green told Harry about his theory that the Mirror had hacked into his doctor’s phone to get details about a thumb he broke while a student at Eton College.

“No,” Harry replied, adding, “I’m not the one who wrote the article, so you’ll have to ask the journalist who wrote it.”

Yet there were also dramatic moments where Harry was able to make a broader point about how the tabloid press treats people like him. Asked by Mr. Green whether the public had an interest in knowing about his youthful drug use – an issue covered extravagantly in the pages of The Daily Mirror – Harry replied: “There is a difference between public interest and what interests the public.”

There were other clear signs that Harry was no ordinary prosecutor. Photographers and camera crews crowded outside the court when he arrived. As he took his place on the stand, lawyers briefly discussed how to address the witness, who also bears the title Duke of Sussex. They settled on Prince Harry.

Harry is one of four plaintiffs in this case, one of only two civil suits rooted in the 2011 phone hacking scandal that led to the lawsuit. He is the first senior royal to testify in court since 1891, when the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, testified in the case of a man accused of cheating at a game of baccarat.

For the prince, whose reputation in Britain has been tarnished by his acrimonious split with the royal family, the trial was a rare opportunity to take a stand against a news media that has its own checkered reputation. Aside from the allegations in the case, Harry sees the trial as a platform to call for a major overhaul of the British press.

In written testimony submitted by his lawyers, Harry said the state of the British press, like that of the British government, was at an all-time low. His blunt remark was yet another precedent-shattering move: Royals, as usual, never venture into political commentary.

To win the case, Harry will have to convince the judge, Timothy Fancourt, that the Mirror Group intercepted his voicemail messages and those of those close to him and used other unlawful means to collect information. Proving that hacking can be a high bar given the time that has passed since the Mirror articles quoted by Harry were published.

In a file, Harry’s lawyers wrote that he often experienced “suspicious” activity on his phone, including missed calls or hangings, from numbers he didn’t recognize or were hidden. But the lawyers admitted that after so many years he couldn’t remember the dates on which this activity took place.

The Mirror denies hacking Harry’s phone or those of the three other accusers, although it admitted in 2014 that it had hacked into other public figures and publicly apologized the following year. It has admitted to obtaining information unlawfully through a private investigator and said this warranted any compensation to the plaintiffs, although neither party has advanced any amount for monetary damages.

Besides Harry, they are Nikki Sanderson and Michael Taylor, who both appeared in the hit TV series ‘Coronation Street’, and Fiona Wightman, the former wife of a well-known comedian, Paul Whitehouse.

In the absence of irrefutable evidence of hacking, Harry’s lawyers, led by David Sherborne, rely heavily on inferences. They have submitted as evidence 147 articles published by Mirror tabloids containing information which they claim could only have been obtained illegally, either due to the private nature of the material or because only a small circle of people know about it used to be.

But the Mirror Group’s lawyers countered that the details in those articles could come from other legitimate sources. Aside from that, they claim Harry waited too long to file the lawsuit, noting that the alleged misconduct took place between 1991 and 2011.

Harry is expected to continue to testify for several hours on Wednesday. With the other accusers and Jane Kerr, a former royal reporter for The Mirror, also set to testify in the coming days, the trial is expected to take a few weeks.

Most of the exchanges on Tuesday focused on the origins of the articles submitted by Harry’s attorneys. Mr Green attempted to argue that the information had been provided by assistants at Buckingham Palace or was already in the public domain.

For example, on the report about Harry breaking his thumb, The Mirror’s lawyer argued that it was readily available. But Harry pointed out specific details in the Mirror story that were attributed to a doctor.

“Not only do I have no idea how they would know, but things like that instill paranoia in a young man,” Harry said, adding that it was possible his doctor’s phone had been hacked to get the information (the doctor is not expected to testify).

In the reports of his drug use, Mr Green quoted a passage from Harry’s memoir, ‘Spare’, in which he recalled that assistants in his father’s office had decided to cooperate with the tabloids in reporting the story.

It is perhaps inevitable that Harry’s love life also features in the testimony. The Prince said he believed The Daily Mirror used a technique known as “blagging” – which involves the use of deceptive methods to obtain personal information – to access the flight details of one of his former girlfriends, Chelsy Davy, for a trip the pair made to Mozambique.

Harry, who has said intrusive reporting contributed to his split from Ms Davy, referred to an article which described his former girlfriend as having a “tongue down” after a party at which he was reportedly seen with another girl.

“I have no idea how anyone would know,” Harry said of the nugget, adding that it could have been obtained by hacking into his friend’s phone. When Mr. Green asked why that friend had not been called to testify, Harry said, “I would like to spare most of my friends this experience.”