Prince Harry a no-show on first day of court showdown with tabloid publisher
A broken thumb, a back injury, dabbling with drugs and dating girls.
No event in the life of a young Prince Harry was too trivial or private for the journalists of Mirror Group Newspapers to resist, and the demand for such scoops led to the use of illegal means to dig up the dirt, his lawyer said yesterday in opening statements in his phone hacking lawsuit.
“Nothing was sacrosanct or out of bounds and there was no protection from these unlawful information-gathering methods,” attorney David Sherborne said.
Harry’s highly anticipated showdown with the publisher of the Daily Mirror in his battles with the British press was anticlimactic when the star of the show failed to turn up — to the chagrin of the judge and defense lawyer.
The Duke of Sussex was unavailable to testify that afternoon because he’d taken a flight from Los Angeles after the birthday of his 2-year-old daughter, Lilibet, on Sunday, Sherborne said.
“I’m a little surprised,” said Justice Timothy Fancourt, noting he had directed Harry to be in court for the first day of his case if time allowed for him to begin testifying.
Mirror Group’s lawyer, Andrew Green, said he was “deeply troubled” by Harry’s absence, adding he’d need a day and a half to cross-examine the prince.
The case against Mirror Group is the first of the prince’s several lawsuits against the media to go to trial, and one of three alleging tabloid publishers unlawfully snooped on him in their cutthroat competition for scoops on the royal family.
When he enters the witness box, Harry, 38, will be the first member of the British royal family in more than a century to testify in court. He is expected to describe his anguish and anger over being hounded by the media throughout his life, and its impact on those around him.
He has blamed paparazzi for causing the car crash that killed his mother, Princess Diana, and said harassment and intrusion by the U.K. press, including allegedly racist articles, led him and his wife, Meghan, to flee to the U.S. in 2020 and leave royal life behind.
Mirror Group has admitted using a private investigator to target Harry, but only once. Sherborne said phone hacking and forms of unlawful information-gathering were carried out on such a widespread scale that this was implausible.
“The ends justify the means for the defendant,” Sherborne said.
Stories about Harry were big sellers for the newspapers, and some 2,500 articles had covered all facets of his life – from injuries at school to experimenting with marijuana and cocaine to the ups and downs with girlfriends, Sherborne said.
The articles at issue in the trial date back to his 12th birthday, in 1996, when the Mirror reported he felt “badly” about the divorce of his mother and father, now King Charles III.
Harry said in court documents that he suffered “huge bouts of depression and paranoia” over concerns that friends and associates were betraying him by leaking information to the newspapers. Relationships fell apart as the women in his life – and even their family members – were “dragged into the chaos.”
He says he later discovered the source wasn’t disloyal friends but aggressive journalists and the private investigators they hired to eavesdrop on voicemails and track him to locations as remote as Argentina and an island off Mozambique. BRIAN MELLEY & JILL LAWLESS, LONDON, MDT/AP
