Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex has told a court he is suing the publisher of the Daily Mirror to stop “absolute intrusion and hate” towards him and his wife.
Prince Harry was giving evidence against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) over illegal newsgathering claims, including phone hacking.
He was choked-up as he finished giving evidence for a second day, and said it had been “a lot”.
MGN denies it used illegal methods to gather stories about the prince.
At London’s High Court, the prince explained he started discussions about possible legal action after a chance-meeting in France in 2018 with David Sherborne, now his barrister.
The prince said before then he had no concerns over any particular newspaper stories due to unlawful activity because it “was all contained in the Palace”.
When asked about his discussions with lawyers after that chance meeting with Mr Sherborne, Prince Harry said he had wanted to put a stop to the “absolute intrusion and hate that was coming towards” him and the Duchess of Sussex.
He said he also wanted to “see if there was any way to find a different course of action, rather than relying on the Institution’s way”.
But in cross-examination, Andrew Green KC, the lawyer representing the publisher of the Mirror, Sunday Mirror and The People, suggested Harry had not found a single story that came from phone hacking.
Harry replied “there is hard evidence to suggest an incredible amount of suspiciousness” over how stories were sourced and he believed burner phones were used “extensively”, referring to phones that can be disposed of so no records are kept.
Prince Harry alleges about 140 articles published between 1996 and 2010 – from his childhood into early adulthood – contained information gathered using unlawful methods, with a sample of 33 stories written about him being considered by the civil court.
Many of the stories the prince claimed were obtained illegally concerned his relationship with his ex-girlfriend Chelsy Davy.
In a 2006 Sunday People article Ms Davy was said to have been “screaming for half an hour” at him on the phone and “blew her top” over his visit to a Spearmint Rhino lap dancing club in Berkshire.
Asked where he thought the information on her screaming had come from, the prince said: “At this point, knowing that my girlfriend’s number was bizarrely in the hands of Mirror journalists, that they probably looked through her call data and saw missed calls, late calls… and managed to put together a story based on that.”
“It was very suspicious that they had her number,” he added, and he did not believe she would have given the Mirror Group or any journalists her phone number.
The prince told the court he once found a tracking device on Ms Davy’s car at a time when the press were reporting on what was described as a “make-or-break” holiday for the couple.
He also highlighted another article in The People in 2007 which reported a “Palace source” saying the couple had been having “monumental” rows and their relationship was “in crisis after a string of bitter bust-ups”. Again he said it was “incredibly suspicious” as he had never discussed his relationship with the Palace.
Mr Green responded by saying we are in the “land of total speculation about where this information might have come from”.
The couple broke up in 2010 after a six-year on-off relationship. She attended the prince’s wedding to Meghan in Windsor in 2018.
The prince was also asked about The People publishing photographs of the prince, a friend Mark Dyer and the late TV presenter Caroline Flack meeting up.
At the time he suspected one of his friends had leaked the details after they were confronted by photographers. In turn this led him and his brother William to stop talking to Mr Dyer for some time afterwards.
However he said: “I now believe the information came from our voicemails… Even those I trusted the most, I ended up doubting.”
Asked how he would react if the court concluded that he had never been hacked by any MGN journalist, Harry said that he had been hacked on an “industrial scale” and he would “feel some injustice” if he did not win the trial.
After Prince Harry’s evidence concluded, he stayed to see the Daily Mirror’s former royal correspondent Jane Kerr give her evidence.
She had been a royal reporter for the newspaper and later royal correspondent for a decade up to 2007 and wrote a number of the articles under scrutiny in the case.
In her written witness statement, she denied voicemail hacking or using private investigators to carry out unlawful information gathering.
Asked about her use of private investigators, Ms Kerr told the court she had “no reason to believe” details for stories had been obtained unlawfully.
“These were people who were well known to the news desk, I did not think there was anything wrong with using them,” she said.
Three other people are also bringing claims against MGN in this case – Coronation Street actors Michael Turner, known professionally as Michael Le Vell, and Nikki Sanderson, as well as Fiona Wightman, the ex-wife of comedian Paul Whitehouse.
The claimants allege unlawful methods were used to obtain information for stories and say senior executives must have known about it and failed to stop it, which MGN denies.
The publisher has either denied or not admitted each of the claims. MGN also argues that some of the claimants have brought their legal action too late.
bbc
