Prince Harry is the first royal to testify in a phone hacking trial

The phone hacking tabloid newspaper principal-harry testifies in court-phone-hacking-tabloid-newspaper-printing

LONDON — In the days after 13-year-old Milly Dowler went missing on her way home from school in 2002, her parents kept calling her cell phone. Her voicemail box was always full.

After four days after she left, it suddenly rang through to her phone. Someone had checked her messages. It gave her parents hope that she was alive and well.

But it was not true hope. It wasn’t Milly who’d checked her voicemail that day. By then, she was already dead — murdered by a serial killer. A tabloid newspaper was responsible for hacking her voicemail.

The phone-hacking scandal that engulfed Britain’s tabloids in the early 2000s was spurred by the revelation that Milly’s phone had been hacked. Since Murdoch closed the News of the World tabloid, his newspapers have paid more than $1 billion to settle hacking claims.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/05/1180093436/prince-harry-testifies-in-court-phone-hacking-tabloid

The Duke of Sussex will testify in the Mirror Group’s trial next week in phone-hacking charges against Meghan and Edwards, whose death inspired Meghan’s car crash and suicide

The Duke of Sussex is set to testify this week, likely starting on Tuesday, in one of the only phone-hacking lawsuits to go to trial rather than be settled. It’s the first time a senior British royal has given evidence in court in over a century.

Harry vowed to take this to trial in part to force a public disclosure about when and which newspaper executives were aware of phone-hacking. He has vowed not to give up, saying that reforming the media landscape is his “life’s work.”

Alice Enders said that unlike other victims of press intrusion, Harry was able to see the legal battle through.

He also claimed that some editors and journalists had inadvertently caused death — a veiled reference to the 1997 paparazzi car chase that led to the car crash that killed his mother, Princess Diana, in Paris.

The prince said that his decision to move to the United States was a result of the constant intrusion of the press, and said it had a great impact on his mental health. He has also accused the tabloids of being racist in their coverage of Meghan.

Giving evidence in court carries its own risks. In addition to having to make his case against the Mirror, he will also face cross-examination himself. He is expected to face questioning about his own personal life — which could include questions about his mother Diana and his relationships before his marriage to Markle.

The judge in the trial of the Mirror was annoyed that Harry didn’t show up for the opening statements, and admonished his lawyers. Harry is likely to testify Tuesday.

The Mirror Group’s lawyer was going to cross-examine Harry later Tuesday, and he was renowned for being a beast in the court. Andrew Green has been forensically going through each of the 147 newspaper articles that Harry is basing his claim on, looking for holes in his argument.

“The tabloids were known to publish articles about me that were often wrong but also have snippets of truth, which I think were most likely gleaned from voicemail interception and/or illegal information gathering,” he said in his statement submitted to the court.

To that end, the prince described how he first began to suspect that his voicemails were being intercepted. He said the articles would include “snippets of truth.”

On Monday, the prince was criticized for not showing up in court for the start of the trial, with the judge saying he was a “little surprised” by his absence.

Since the 19th century, he is the first royal to testify in court. He passed the crowd of people outside the High Court in London while dressed in a dark suit. In the courtroom, he sat in a wooden box. He was formally sworn in and later his lawyer said that he would be referred to as “Prince Harry.”

Those were some of the first words in Prince Harry’s witness statement Tuesday at the High Court in London, where he’s been giving evidence against the publisher of the British tabloid, The Daily Mirror. His statement was released to the media when he took the stand.

In it, Harry described the toll press intrusion had on him and his relationships, saying news stories “played a destructive role” as he grew up. He said the tabloids’ behavior led to a downward spiral in his teenage years.