Prince Harry’s phone was hacked by the British tabloid, judge rules in historic case

a court in London on Friday found in favor of Prince Harry in a lawsuit he filed against a British tabloid publisher, a major victory in the royal family’s long-running battle with the British news media over the intrusion into his life.

The judge ruled that there was sufficient evidence that Mirror Group Newspapers, owner of several publications, was guilty of unlawful information gathering, including phone hacking, in its reporting on Harry.

Judge Timothy Fancourt ruled in his ruling that the information contained in 15 of the 33 articles submitted by Harry’s lawyers as evidence of phone hacking was unlawful. collected by journalists, and awarded the royal family some 140,600 pounds, or about $180,000, in damages. He said it appeared Harry’s personal phone was targeted between 2004 and 2009.

The lawsuit, a civil case, is one of a number of cases brought by Harry, the Duke of Sussex and the youngest son of King Charles III, and his wife Meghan against the British tabloid news media over privacy rights.

The ruling, the first in Harry’s three lawsuits brought before the British courts, goes some way to justifying that crusade.

Harry, 39, had alleged that journalists from tabloids The Mirror, The Sunday Mirror and The Sunday People targeted him and those in his inner circle by accessing his voicemail messages and using other unlawful methods for years, causing him to ‘ caused significant distress.

Most of the actions described in the case took place from 1991 to 2011, at a time when Harry was third in line to the British throne, behind his father and older brother William.

During the case, Harry gave evidence for more than seven hours in a London courtroom in June, becoming the first senior member of the British royal family to take the stand since the 19th century. His lawyer submitted 147 newspaper articles as evidence, dozens of which were forensically examined during the hearing.

In his testimony, Harry said that the negative stories about him and his family that appeared on the front pages of the newspapers had led him to distrust even his closest friends. In written evidence, he stated that editors and journalists had “blood on their hands” because of the methods they had used and the lengths they had taken to report on him and his family. Harry’s mother, Diana, died in a car crash in 1997 after being chased by photographers in Paris.

During his hours of testimony, Harry discussed Mirror Group articles about his life, some of which were written when he was in primary school, and which often revealed disturbing or damaging personal details.

One included details of breaking his thumb at school.

“Not only do I have no idea how they would know that, but that sort of thing creates paranoia in a young man,” Harry testified, suggesting his doctor’s phone could have been hacked to obtain the information.

Several stories focused on Harry’s relationship with Chelsy Davy, an ex-girlfriend, whom he started dating after leaving school. The prince said that at some point the pair found a tracking device on her car.

Crucially, Harry’s cross-examination provided no concrete evidence of phone hacking. That became a central question facing the judge, who had to decide whether a series of highly detailed stories about Harry’s private life constituted sufficient evidence that the Mirror Group tabloids had used illegal methods to obtain information about him.

A lawyer for the Mirror Group, Andrew Green, had pressed the royal family for hard evidence that its journalists had hacked into his phone, arguing that much of the information Harry and his legal team said had been unlawfully obtained was in fact available through other sources, including press officers associated with the royal family.

At the end of July, a judge in Great Britain ruled that’s just part of another lawsuit Harry filed against Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids was expected to appear in court in January.