LONDON — Prince Harry is returning to court this week for the third and final chapter of his legal quest to tame the British tabloids, starting on Monday, with millions of dollars at stake.
The Duke of Sussex is the lead plaintiff in a case filled with high-profile plaintiffs who have accused the publisher of the Daily Mail of invading their privacy by using unlawful information-gathering tactics to spy on them for sensationalist headlines.
Harry, Elton John and actors Elizabeth Hurley and Sadie Frost are among a group of seven who allege Associated Newspapers Ltd. hired private investigators to bug their cars, look at their personal records and eavesdrop on phone calls.
The publisher has denied the allegations and described them as absurd.
The trial at the High Court in London is expected to last nine weeks and Harry will return to the witness box for the second time since he made history in 2023 by becoming the first senior member of the royal family to testify in more than a century.
The case was one of several to emerge from a widespread phone hacking scandal in which some journalists began intercepting voicemail messages at the turn of the century and continued for more than a decade.
Harry won a court judgment in 2023 that found the publishers of the Daily Mirror guilty of “widespread and habitual” phone hacking. Last year, Rupert Murdoch’s leading UK tabloid made an unprecedented apology for years of intruding into his life, and agreed to pay substantial damages to settle his privacy invasion lawsuit.
Harry’s self-proclaimed mission to reform the media is more personal and goes far beyond the headlines that attempted to document the ups and downs of his party boy youth and romance.
He holds the press responsible for the death of his mother, Princess Diana, who died in a car accident while being pursued by paparazzi in Paris in 1997. He also blames her for his continued attacks on his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, which led her to leave royal life and move to the United States in 2020.
The lawsuit comes as Harry tries to repair his troubled relationship with his family since moving to the US and burning the bridges behind him by writing a searing 2023 memoir, “Spare,” and airing other family grievances in the Netflix series.
There appears to be a slight thaw in the frosty relationship with his father, King Charles III, after the two met for tea last autumn, when Harry was last in town.
But this time there is no possibility of reunion.
The trial begins with Charles’ visit to Scotland and Harry’s visit is expected to be limited to the opening of the trial and his opening testimony.
The case against the Mail was filed in 2022 and has been the subject of several contentious hearings that have led to verdicts that each side has claimed as victories.
Lawyers for Associated Newspapers had argued that the case should be dismissed because the claims dating back to 1993 were brought too late. But in a ruling that said the cases had a “real prospect of succeeding”, Judge Matthew Nicklin said the papers were not able to deliver a “knockout blow” to the claims.
In the same ruling, Nicklin handed a victory to the Mail, saying that Harry and others could not use records that allegedly showed payments to private investigators by the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday because they had been confidentially disclosed in a government investigation into phone hacking.
But Harry’s lawyers later got permission from UK government officials to access the documents.
A private investigator named in a sworn statement supporting Harry and the celebrities’ claims has filed another statement denying he ever spied on them.
During a preliminary hearing in the case, attorney David Sherbourne said his clients had no idea they were victims of phone hacking until Gavin Burrows and other investigators came forward in 2021 to “do the right thing” and help those targeted by them.
Burrows said he “must have done hundreds” for the Mail between 2000 and 2005 and that Harry, John and her husband, David Furnish, and Hurley and Frost were “just a few of my targets.”
But after this he signed another statement saying that Associated Newspapers had not appointed him to do any illegal work.
It is unclear what impact their conflicting statements will have on the case.
Other contenders are anti-racism activist Doreen Lawrence and former politician Simon Hughes.
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