“They pushed me too far,” Harry told ITV’s Rebecca Barry.
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Prince Harry has given his first interview since winning a privacy lawsuit against a major British tabloid, speaking at length about the ongoing legal battle and why the late Queen Elizabeth II “is very inclined to say, ‘Follow it through.'”
In ITV’s in-depth documentary Tabloids on trialaired in the UK on Thursday night, the Duke of Sussex was among a myriad of names, including Hugh Grant, former England football star Paul Gascoigne and former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who spoke about their fight for justice in the vast phone-tapping scandal and the legal battles that followed.
The prince claims he was targeted by journalists and private investigators working for Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers (NGN) The sun and the now disappeared World Newswhich closed in 2011. Grant was also among those involved in NGN’s legal proceedings (the Briton settled the illegal spying case last month after high legal fees forced his hand, he revealed in the document). NGN has denied that any illegal wrongdoing ever took place.
In December, London judge Timothy Fancourt ruled in Harry’s favour in a 386-page High Court ruling. He said the wiretapping, which the prince said dated back to 2003, was “widespread and routine” at Mirror Group Newspapers – and that company executives covered it up. Harry, who is breaking with royal tradition in the fight, becoming the first member of the family to give evidence in open court in more than a century, also has an ongoing case against Britain’s police chief. The daily mail.
“I’m trying to get justice for everybody,” Harry told ITV journalist Rebecca Barry. “It’s a David versus Goliath situation – the Davids are the plaintiffs, and the Goliath is this vast media corporation.” Asked about his December 2023 victory against MGN, he said: “I felt vindicated. Phone hacking has been going on for a long time… There’s an awful lot that’s come to light now that people and the British public in particular had no idea about.”
Harry claims his voicemails were intercepted and his flight records were doctored (a term that means information was obtained dishonestly), among other significant invasions of his privacy. “It was like harassment,” he said of the paparazzi assault. “It was horrible then. It’s horrible now.”
The prince also explained that taking the tabloids to court had caused a “rift” between him and his family, but said he saw the fight as necessary for his wife, Meghan Markle, and their children. “It’s clear to everyone now that the risk of going after the press and the risk of retaliation from them by making these allegations. It’s clearly not in the best interests (of the royal family) to do that. It’s clear over the last four years with my wife, my children… They’ve pushed me too far, (and) it’s gotten to a point where you’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t.”
“There’s no one better placed than me to take this case forward,” he continued, before discussing the danger the tabloids pose to his family’s safety. “That’s one of the reasons I’m not bringing my wife back to this country.” Barry then asked if his “grandmother,” Queen Elizabeth II, would support the lawsuit. “We had many conversations before she passed away. It’s something she was very supportive of. She knew how much it meant to me,” he recalled. “She’s always there to say, ‘Follow it through,’ without a doubt.”
The prince also said it would be “nice” if he had the support of his family, even if he was doing it for “his own reasons”. He added: “Anything I say about my family is met with a torrent of abuse from the press. I’ve made it clear that this is something that needs to be done.” He expressed fears that his mother, Princess Diana, was one of the first victims of phone hacking.
Grant told Barry that his flat had been broken into, bugged in his planters and thrown into his car, and that the medical records of him and his children’s mothers had been stolen from NHS databases. “These people live above the law and the police. At the time, they were as dangerous as journalists because the Metropolitan Police simply called the tabloids to warn them.”
Grant settled out of court, which he said implied guilt: “If you’re innocent, why would you give someone so much money so you don’t have to go to court?” he said. But he claims the out-of-court settlement was the only possible solution, because if he went to court and won, “even one penny less” in damages meant he would have had to cover both sides’ costs. “And that would have been about £10m.”
The document covered the 2012 Leveson Inquiry, a judicial public inquiry into the phone-tapping scandal that saw Murdoch himself and the former editor of World News Piers Morgan was sworn in and questioned. But Barry reported that the tabloids often blamed most of the misdeeds on “rogue” journalists and denied that the practice was widespread. However, a former journalist at one of the papers told the ITV reporter that phone hacking was “almost an industry standard technique”. He gave an example where journalists posed as members of Bob Geldof’s staff to obtain a bill from a French hotel. They called every number on the bill, he said, to find out who Geldof’s new girlfriend was.
The documentary also raises allegations of cover-ups, including the deletion of thousands of emails dating back to before 2004 from NGN’s servers. The company maintains that this was a “long-planned” clean-up of its systems and that no cover-up took place. Prince Harry hopes his trial will begin as early as next year.
While NGN has continued to deny that any illegal activity took place, an MGN spokesperson said when the prince won his claims against the group: “We are pleased to have reached this settlement, which gives our business greater clarity moving forward following events that took place many years ago and for which we have apologised.”