The Juiciest Revelations From Prince Harry’s Court Cases

Harry and Meghan have a longstanding beef with Piers Morgan. Well before the TV host exited Good Morning Britain amid complaints about his callous remarks about the duchess, he was editor of the Daily Mirror from 1995 to 2004. In a witness statement from his case against Mirror Group Newspapers, Harry accused Morgan and his journalists of spying on him and his mother.

“The thought of Piers Morgan and his band of journalists earwigging into my mother’s private and sensitive messages (in the same way as they have me) and then having given her a ‘nightmare time’ three months prior to her death in Paris, makes me feel physically sick,” Prince Harry said.

Harry added that he and Meghan were “subjected to a barrage of horrific personal attacks and intimidation” from Morgan, “presumably in retaliation and in the hope that I will back down, before being able to hold him properly accountable for his unlawful activity towards both me and my mother during his editorship.”

During her testimony in June, former Daily Mirror royal editor Jane Kerr said Morgan “engaged with the Palace press offices and would occasionally direct or inject information into a story” that she had written. When asked about specific information in her decades-old stories Kerr repeatedly said she couldn’t remember the source, according to the BBC.

Morgan has insisted that no illegal news-gathering took place at the Mirror when he was in charge.

Harry said in his June 6 witness statement that he was disturbed by two articles published in The People in 2002 about “a plot to steal a sample of my DNA to test my parentage.” Aside from the supposed plot itself, he was concerned about the motives behind the stories. “Were the newspapers keen to put doubt into the minds of the public so I might be ousted from the Royal Family?” he wrote.

He said that at the time he was unaware that the facts don’t support the rumor that Hewitt, not King Charles, is his father:

Numerous newspapers had reported a rumour that my biological father was James Hewitt, a man my mother had a relationship with after I was born. At the time of this article and others similar to it, I wasn’t actually aware that my mother hadn’t met Major Hewitt until after I was born. This timeline is something I only learnt of in around 2014, although I now understand this was common knowledge amongst the Defendant’s journalists. At the time, when I was 18 years old and had lost my mother just six years earlier, stories such as this felt very damaging and very real to me. They were hurtful, mean and cruel.

Harry said in his June 6 witness statement that he was mocked at school after the Daily Mirror reported, accurately, that he had come down with “glandular fever” (a.k.a mono). He says he has no idea “how anyone outside of my immediate family knew this,” as he does not think the palace would have leaked it and “I didn’t tell anyone as I was ashamed of having contracted it.”

He said the story reinforced the media narrative that he was “irresponsible or reckless” and he was mocked at school after the story ran:

It’s one of those infections that had a huge stigma attached to it when you’re a teenager, which is exactly what the article itself is playing on, and the impact on me was huge. Whenever anyone got it while we were at school, they would be teased endlessly whenever people knew, and this article made sure the whole country knew about my diagnosis. The whole school seemed to know, no one would go near me and I was a bit of a laughing stock.

In his June 6 witness statement Harry said his former Chelsy Davy, who lived abroad, was always hounded by paparazzi from the moment she arrived in the U.K. Now he believes that MGN journalists were scouring their private communications to track her.

Harry wrote that they “always seemed to know that she was coming – it is only since commencing this claim that I realised that MGN journalists were blagging her flight details so that would know exactly when she was going to arrive so that they could have photographers at the ready.”

He added that on occasion, “the paparazzi would be so aggressive in their pursuit of her that we would have to enlist the help of the airport police, which obviously detracts from their main task of keeping the airports, and the general public who use them, safe.”

This meant there was “no down time or escape” from the media for the couple. Even when they booked trips to remote locations to avoid the press, “journalists and photographers from MGN and the other tabloids would literally turn up and book into the hotel before we got there.”

In a witness statement released shortly before his testimony on June 6, Prince Harry described a pattern of suspicious activity on his cell phone dating back to the late ‘90s.

“I remember on multiple occasions hearing a voicemail for the first time that wasn’t ‘new,’” he wrote. “I also distinctly remember people saying to me ’did you not get my voicemail?’ on both a personal and a work-related level. I was like, ’no,’ and sometimes I would go back into my voicemail to look for it but still couldn’t find it.”

At the time Harry thought these were glitches, as cell phones were new, but now he believes the strange activity is evidence that MGN journalists had hacked his voicemails.

Prince Harry is suing Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers, which owns The Sun and the now-defunct News of the World, for alleged phone hacking and other illegal information gathering that he claims took place from about 1994 to 2016. NGN tried to have the case thrown out, arguing that Harry should have brought it sooner. But Harry claims he was blocked from taking legal action by a “secret agreement” between NGN and his family. Harry said the royals wanted to avoid having to testify about humiliating details from their intercepted communications, so they agreed that any royal hacking victims would not pursue their claims in court until the hundreds of other phone-hacking cases against NGN had concluded.

In a witness statement released in March, Prince Harry explained that King Charles and Queen Camilla’s “Tampongate” incident still had the family rattled. “The institution was incredibly nervous about this and wanted to avoid at all costs the sort of reputational damage that it had suffered in 1993 when The Sun and another tabloid had unlawfully obtained and published details of an intimate telephone conversation that took place between my father and stepmother in 1989, while he was still married to my mother,” he said, per People.

Lawyers for News Group Newspapers have countered that, “There was no such secret agreement,” and the prince’s claims are “without merit in fact or in law,” according to the BBC.

Harry said he was “kept out of the loop” about the royals’ deal with NGN until 2012. Then in the lead-up to his 2018 wedding to Meghan Markle, he became frustrated that NGN papers would be covering the event, though they had never been held accountable for violating his privacy. He talked to Prince William about his desire to get “permission to push for a resolution to our phone-hacking claims and a formal apology from Murdoch.”

William was supportive and urged him to talk to “Granny,” Harry said. He wrote in the witness statement: “I spoke to her shortly afterwards and said something along the lines of ‘Are you happy for me to push this forward, do I have your permission?’ and she said ‘yes.’”

But despite this authorization from the queen herself, Harry alleged that the royal institution was “seemingly blocking our every move” as part of its effort to keep the media “onside in order to smooth the way for my stepmother, and father, to be accepted by the British public as queen consort and king respectively.”

Harry claims that when he sued NGN and MGN in 2019, he was “summoned to Buckingham Palace and specifically told to drop the legal actions because they have an ‘effect on all the family.’ This was a direct request (or rather demand) from my father; Edward Young [private secretary to the queen]; and my father’s private secretary, Clive Alderton.”

NGN attorney Anthony Hudson dismissed Harry’s claims, noting “the extreme vagueness with which the circumstances of the secret agreement are described in the Duke of Sussex’s evidence.” As The Guardian summarized:

The barrister pointed out that Harry did not say in his evidence who had made the agreement, whom it applied to, when it was made, or a date when it was meant to expire. A list of lawyers who had worked in high-profile jobs at Murdoch’s company all insisted they had never heard of such a deal.

But Harry did offer one pretty explosive revelation to back up his claim: Prince William settled his own phone-hacking claim against NGN “for a huge sum of money” in 2020. Harry did not say what exactly the settlement was about, or how much money William received, but The Telegraph reported it was “around £1 million.”

In his witness statement, Harry said William had seemingly struck “some favorable deal in return for him going ‘quietly’ so to speak. This goes to prove the existence of this secret agreement between the institution and senior executives at NGN.”

Both Prince William and NGN have declined to comment on Harry’s allegations.