Prince Harry has presented himself as “the last person” who could hold British tabloids to account for years of predatory conduct during the wiretapping scandal. On Wednesday he settled for a partial victory in his lone campaign.
Harry settled a long-running lawsuit with Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers over illegal intelligence gathering, winning a multimillion-pound payout and, perhaps most significantly, admitting to “unlawful” conduct by hired private investigators from The Sun, the company’s flagship tabloid.
But the settlement averted what could have been weeks of damaging testimony about phone hacking and other illegal practices used by News Group to ferret out personal information about Harry and other prominent figures more than a decade ago. Harry, who failed to appear in court on Wednesday, was due to take the stand next month.
It marked the end of an era of high-profile lawsuits arising from the hacking scandal, one of the darkest periods in British media history. And it gave Harry long-sought recognition for the tabloids’ relentless intrusion into the life of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, who died in a car crash in Paris in 1997 while being chased by photographers.
News Group Newspapers offered a “full and unequivocal apology” for hacking Harry’s mobile phone and intruding into his and Diana’s personal lives, “particularly during her youth”.
“We recognize and apologize for the distress caused to the Duke and the damage inflicted on relationships, friendships and family, and have agreed to compensate him for substantial damages,” the company said in a contrite five-paragraph statement, referring to Harry of his formal title, the Duke of Sussex.
The deal, announced a day after the trial began at London’s High Court, spared Harry, 40, the youngest son of King Charles III, from heavy financial risks, regardless of how he performed in court .
Under English law, aimed at resolving disputes out of court where possible, Harry would have been required to pay both parties’ legal costs unless the court awarded him an amount equal to what News Group had offered him in the transaction.
While neither party disclosed the amount of the financial settlement, it was worth at least £10 million ($12.3 million), according to two people familiar with the deal. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the parties had agreed not to disclose the number.
An agreement in 11 hours to avoid a trial
The last-minute deal underlined the dire economic situation for private individuals facing deep-pocketed corporations in Britain. Murdoch’s companies used lucrative profits to avoid trials in 1,300 cases arising from the wiretapping scandal. Harry’s older brother Prince William paid a “huge sum of money” in 2020, Harry said in his case.
In April, actor Hugh Grant said he felt forced to settle the hacking case against News Group Newspapers because “even if every allegation was proven in court, I would still be liable for something approaching £10m in costs . I’m afraid I’m shy in front of that fence.
In the United States, Murdoch’s Fox News paid $787.5 million in April 2023 to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems over the cable network’s promotion of false claims about Dominion voting machines in the 2020 elections.
News Group Newspapers said Wednesday that after a decade of hacking-related lawsuits, the settlement “draws a line from the past and brings this litigation to an end.” He noted that the judge in the case, Timothy Fancourt, noted that these cases were the last ones with a good chance of making it to trial.
News Group also apologized and paid damages to Harry’s fellow actor, Tom Watson, a former deputy leader of the Labor Party, for what it described as The News of The World between 2009 and 2011, during his time in government. The company admitted it was “put under surveillance” in 2009 by the tabloid.
Mr Murdoch closed The News of the World in 2011 after it emerged the newspaper had illegally hacked into the voicemail of a murdered schoolgirl. Until now, though, the company had never acknowledged wrongdoing by anyone at the Sun. News Group stressed that the admission of wrongdoing refers to private investigators hired by the paper between 1996 and 2011, not its journalists.
However, the recognition is significant because Rebekah Brooks, the current chief executive of News UK, was editor of The Sun from 2003 to 2009 and had described it at a parliamentary hearing into phone hacking as a “very clean ship”. Ms Brooks denied any wrongdoing and was acquitted of criminal charges in a 2014 hacking case.
“For the first time in this protracted litigation, and despite repeated previous denials, Murdoch’s flagship newspaper, The Sun, has had to make an unprecedented admission,” said Daniel Taylor, a media lawyer who represented plaintiffs in other hacking cases. “He hired private investigators to carry out illegal activities in relation to Prince Harry.”
Unanswered questions
The statement did not directly refer to Will Lewis, a former News UK executive who helped Murdoch deal with the fallout from the scandal and is now the editor of the Washington Post. But one paragraph raised doubts about his role.
In 2011, when police were investigating allegations of illegal activity at News UK, it confronted managers about why some emails had suddenly been removed from its servers. Mr Lewis told police the company removed them after receiving an unsubstantiated tip-off that Gordon Brown, a former prime minister, was plotting with his allies, including Mr Watson, to steal Ms Brooks’ emails .
News Group admitted that this claim had no basis. “In 2011 News International received information that information was being secretly passed to Lord Watson from within News International. We now understand that this information was false and Lord Watson had not received any confidential information,” he said.
Mr Watson said in an interview last year that the allegation had been “deliberately fabricated by News International in an attempt to justify the destruction and concealment of millions of relevant emails during a criminal investigation”.
A spokesman for Mr Lewis cited a statement he gave to the Times last June, in which he said: “Any allegation of wrongdoing is untrue.”
Speaking outside court after the settlement was announced, Mr Watson said he would hand police a dossier containing evidence of wrongdoing. “I once said that the great beasts of the tabloid jungle have no predators,” he said. “I was wrong. They have Prince Harry. His courage and his astonishing courage brought accountability to a section of the media who thought he was untouchable.”
It remains to be seen whether the police will act. In a statement, a Metropolitan Police spokesperson said: “There are no active police investigations into allegations of phone hacking or related matters. We await any correspondence from the parties involved, to which we will respond in due course.”
However, the deal means Harry will not testify about the tabloids’ treatment of Mr Murdoch – something he did to dramatic effect in 2023, in a similar case against Mirror Group Newspapers, which he won. Nor will his lawyers present to Mr Murdoch’s tabloids what they say was widespread and deeply rooted misconduct.
In addition to intercepting voicemail messages and deleting emails, Harry’s lawyers intended to argue that senior News Group editors encouraged journalists to misrepresent themselves to gain access to intimate details about Harry, a practice known as ” blagging”.
For Harry, solving the case could remove a source of friction between him and his father and brother. Last year, he told ITV News that disagreements over how to deal with the tabloids had deepened the rift with his family, which was also rooted in the way the family treated his wife Meghan.
Harry has sharply criticized Charles and William for a “secret deal”, under which the family agreed to hold off, or settle, legal action against the publisher to avoid having to testify about potentially embarrassing details of their text messages. voice mail intercepted. Although Harry lodged a complaint, he has now accepted a similar arrangement.
In a summary of the planned discussion, Harry’s lawyers cited a text message he wrote to William in 2019, in which he said he was “sick of dad’s office constantly blocking him from us, plus I recently found out until point of their behavior and subsequent cover-ups that must be exposed.”
Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace, where William has his offices, declined to comment on the deal. A spokesman for Harry said he would not comment beyond the statement read by his lawyer, David Sherborne.
Jo Becker contributed reporting from Los Angeles