Save You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from your saved list to add more. TOTOTO London: Prince Harry has lost a major lawsuit against a British publisher over his personal privacy, in a landslide defeat he shares with celebrities including Elton John and Liz Hurley. The High Court ruled that
London: Prince Harry has lost a major lawsuit against a British publisher over his personal privacy, in a landslide defeat he shares with celebrities including Elton John and Liz Hurley.
The High Court ruled that the Duke of Sussex and the other claimants had failed to prove their allegations and dismissed their claims in all respects.
Harry and other defendants The daily mailone of the most powerful newspapers in the country, to use illegal tactics such as phone hacking to obtain its news.
They also claimed he used “blagging,” a practice in which a journalist makes false claims to trick people into divulging information.
The prince was joined in the Hurley case by actress Sadie Frost, politician Simon Hughes and Baroness Doreen Lawrence, a member of the House of Lords whose son was murdered in a racist attack. John joined the case with his husband, David Furnish. They all claimed that the media outlet’s owner, Associated Newspapers, had used illegal means to obtain information about them.
But the court dismissed their claims and said they had not proven there was “unlawful information gathering” (UIG) against them.
“The court emphasized that it was up to the claimants to prove the UIG. These were civil claims, so the legal test was whether the allegations were proven on the balance of probabilities,” wrote High Court Judge Matthew Nicklin in his summing up.
“But the allegations were serious: they included allegations of dishonesty, illegal conduct and deliberately false evidence. The more serious and less probable an allegation, the more convincing the evidence must be before a court can consider it proven.”
The judge concluded that the claims by the prince and others were based on “inferences” rather than hard evidence.
“But suspicion, even when understandable, was not enough,” he wrote.
“Plaintiffs had to prove that the information complained of had been obtained illegally. The court rejected the argument that, simply because the information was private and because Associated could not positively explain how it had been obtained, the relevant article must have been obtained illegally.”
Associated Newspapers strongly denied any wrongdoing in stories that appeared between 1993 and 2018, and its journalists appeared in court to deny blagging or phone hacking.
“The plaintiffs failed to prove the UIG allegations,” the judge concluded.
“The court rejected the attempt to prove the claims by broad inference when a legitimate and realistic possible legal source remained, or when the specific evidence in the article did not demonstrate that the relevant information must have been obtained illegally.”
The decision has implications for Jonathan Vere Harmsworth, the hereditary peer Viscount Rothermere, whose great-grandfather founded The daily mail in 1896.
One allegation against the newspaper was that its journalists illegally obtained details of a “private and intimate” conversation between Harry and his brother, Prince William, about photographs of the death of their mother, Princess Diana, in a car accident in 1997.
Another was that journalists illegally obtained details of a private discussion between Harry and William over a memorial to their mother that involved John’s help. The musician sang a version of Candle in the wind at Princess Diana’s funeral in 1997.
Harry also claimed that the newspaper collected information about his relationships with girlfriends before he met Meghan Markle, whom he married in 2018.
The lawyer representing all of the plaintiffs, David Sherborne, cited text messages, invoices, payment details and other records to argue that the company knew the information was obtained in violation of the law.
The case revived questions about journalism that arose during the investigation into phone hacking by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp more than a decade ago. News Corp was not a party to the current case. Harry settled a lawsuit against News Corp and its London tabloid, the sunworth an estimated £10 million ($19 million) early last year.
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David Crowe is European correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect through X either email.From our partners
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