Prince Harry will not be going to trial against Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers (NGN) following a settlement that was reached at the last minute on Wednesday morning. In addition to a reported eight-figure sum, Harry received a “full and unequivocal apology for the serious intrusion by the Sun between 1996 and 2011 into his private life.” Originally set to go to trial on Tuesday, lawyers were able to delay the proceedings for long enough to reach a settlement.
NGN, which is also the company behind the now shuttered News of the World, acknowledged that there had been “incidents of unlawful activities carried out by private investigators” working for the Sun tabloid and “phone hacking, surveillance, and misuse of private information by journalists and private investigators” working for News of the World. Additionally, NGN apologized to Harry for intruding on the private life of his late mother, Princess Diana.
David Sherborne, the lawyer for Harry and his co-claimant, former lawmaker Lord Tom Watson, made a statement outside the courthouse following the settlement. “Today’s result has been achieved only through the sheer resilience of Prince Harry and Lord Watson, whose willingness to take NGN to trial has led directly to this historic admission of unlawfulness at the Sun,” Sherborne said, “It has only been by taking NGN — not just to the steps of court but inside the court room itself — that these Claimants have finally managed to extract this historic admission of guilt.”
News of the World and Murdoch had previously admitted that there had been some phone hacking at the tabloid (which was shut down in 2011), but this marks the first time that NGN has acknowledged any wrongdoing at the Sun.
This is not the first time Harry has won out against the tabloids. In late 2023, he won his suit against Mirror Group Newspapers, in which he alleged that its journalists had hacked his phone and used illegally obtained information to write stories about him. For that suit — which made him the first senior royal in 130 years to testify in court — he was awarded £140,600. His settlement with NGN, while undisclosed, is reportedly much more than that.
This is all great news for Harry, who has been on the receiving end of some bad press in recent months. First he had to play off divorce rumors, then his polo show for Netflix was deemed a total failure, then a Vanity Fair report came out that basically said he and Meghan Markle are not great businesspeople (and brought the divorce rumors back up). This is also great news for Meghan, because who wants their husband to be in a bad mood when they launch a Netflix show about … making jam with your friends? It’s still sort of unclear what’s going on with that one.