The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

Prince Harry launches his court battle against the tabloids: "The press has been hostile to me since I was born"

2023-06-06T14:31:15.977Z

Highlights: Charles III's son is the first member of the British royal family in 130 years to testify as a witness in a trial. The Duke of Sussex accuses the 'Daily Mirror' of spying on him with illegal methods. Henry of England (38 years old) has finally decided to settle accounts with the tabloid press – the British tabloids – which he has considered for years his main enemy. "How much more blood should stain those fingers that type before someone puts an end to this madness?", has cried the son of Carlos III.


Charles III's son is the first member of the British royal family in 130 years to testify as a witness in a trial. The Duke of Sussex accuses the 'Daily Mirror' of spying on him with illegal methods


Henry of England (38 years old) has finally decided to settle accounts with the tabloid press – the British tabloids – which he has considered for years his main enemy, the cause of all his ills and the ultimate reason for the death of his mother, Lady Di. "How much more blood should stain those fingers that type before someone puts an end to this madness?", has cried the son of Carlos III in a witness statement of 55 pages submitted to the judge and prior to the oral hearing held on Tuesday, although its content has been revealed at the beginning of the session.

The document is the basis on which the Duke of Sussex, along with three other plaintiffs (actors Nikki Sanderson and Michael Turner, along with Fiona Wightman, ex-wife of comedian Paul Whitehouse), has decided to fight in civil court MGN, the publishing group that owns the Daily Mirror, which he accuses of having obtained information about his private life illegally for years. Fundamentally, the prince accuses, through telephone taps and the hacking of his mobile devices. Up to 100 plaintiffs have been assigned to the cause, including singers Cheryl Cole, the heirs of the late George Michael or footballer Ian Wright.

Henry of England has wanted to set a precedent, and skip the unwritten rule of the British royal family: Do not explain, no complain (neither give explanations nor complain). For the first time in 130 years, a member of the Windsors has decided to sit on the bench to settle scores (in 1890, then-Prince Edward had to testify in a libel suit stemming from a batch of letters).

"It was from the beginning a downward spiral, in which the tabloids constantly tried to trap me and present me as a troubled young man, until they managed to get me to do something stupid that would give to write a good story and sell many copies," writes Prince Harry. "When I look back, I understand that it was absolutely evil behavior," he concludes. "The press has been hostile to me since I was born," he summarizes, in a text that contains the same accumulation of grudges, childhood traumas and pending accounts that the second son of Charles of England and Lady Di had already anticipated in autobiography Spare (En la Sombra, Ed. Plaza & Janés).

The problem, as many experts have anticipated, is that Harry no longer airs his grudges in a Netflix series or in an interview with the American presenter Oprah Winfrey, but in a British court that will impose on the Duke of Sussex the burden of proof.

The time of questioning

At approximately 10.00 this Tuesday (11.00, Spanish peninsular time), Prince Harry descended with softness and a slight smile from the Range Rover SUV that had transported him to Rolls Buildings, the court complex located in the City of London (the financial and legal center of the metropolis) where the High Court of England and Wales holds the hearing of the case. Cameras and reporters from all over the world awaited his arrival. Half an hour later, the Duke of Sussex sat on the witness stand to be questioned by MGN's lawyer, Andrew Green. "An opponent to fear, with an aggressive and sharp style in the room (...). Inflexible and tireless, especially comfortable during interrogations and with a great ability to channel unruly judges, "defines Green the website The Legal 500, the main British guide for lawyers and jurists.

The Duke of Sussex had already set a dangerous precedent the day before. Recently arrived from California, where he lives with his wife, Meghan Markle, both he and his lawyers decided that his presence in the courtroom was not necessary on the day the trial began, because the day was going to be consumed with the preliminary arguments of both parties. Timothy Fancourt, the judge in charge of directing the process, could not help but some frustration and surprise to see that they had decided for him the pace of the hearing. "It's never good to make a judge wait, although I don't think it translates into some kind of penalty. But irritating the magistrate somehow puts Prince Harry on the defensive," said Joshua Rozenberg, a lawyer and media legal analyst at the BBC.

The prince's soft tone and calm manner were decomposing as lawyer Green analyzed each of the 33 press articles that Henry's legal team has decided to present as evidence: his mother Lady Di's visits to Eton, the elite school where Harry and his brother William studied; the prince's meeting with friends in a London pub for lunch on a Sunday; the day he broke his finger or the 100th birthday gala of the Queen Mother, his great-grandmother Elizabeth, which neither he nor his brother attended because they chose to go hiking.

If Harry intended, with the details revealed in each of these stories, to reinforce suspicions that journalists obtained illegal access to his private conversations and plans, the lawyer Green cornered the prince with his constant demand for concrete evidence. The prince obtained his first mobile phone in 1998, the lawyer said, while the first of the stories he has presented as evidence of spying had occurred in 1996. Other newspaper articles provided by the Duke of Sussex's legal team were limited to replicating stories that the competition – especially the Daily Mirror – had already told days before, Green insisted. But, above all, the main line of argument of the lawyer, who from the beginning of his intervention has expressed to Enrique his solidarity for "a life constantly subjected to the intrusion of the press", was very simple: being fed up with the constant harassment of the media and the invasion of his privacy does not prove that illegal methods have been used to obtain the information.

"How is it possible that anyone knew that I was in that particular pub, on that specific date and time, so that they could take pictures of me?" asked Harry in his written statement about the episode of the local neighborhood of Chelsea, in London, where the prince had celebrated with friends his 16th birthday.

"Was that information obtained with the hacking of the cell phone?" asked attorney Green.

"You will have to ask the journalist that question," the prince replied defiantly.

"So, isn't that your accusation?" the lawyer replied nimbly.

"Yes it is."

―"On what basis?"

"I don't think my job as a witness is to construct the article or determine what information was obtained illegally and what was not. That's the job of journalists," replied a cornered prince.

In his scorched earth challenge against British institutions, Harry has even decided to attack the current government: "At the national level, at the moment, our country is being judged globally by the state of its press and its government: and I think both have hit rock bottom," the prince wrote in the statement delivered to the judge.

The trial of the Daily Mirror's owners — the first in a series of three prosecutions by the Duke of Sussex against the British tabloid press — may set an important precedent in calculating the amount of compensation demanded from the tabloids for years of malpractice. But it can have the opposite effect, in the event that Henry of England is unable to concretize with evidence in court his grudges accumulated over years.

Follow all the international information on Facebook and Twitter, or in our weekly newsletter.

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Read more

I'm already a subscriber

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2023-06-06

You may like

Life/Entertain 2024-02-28T12:46:10.762Z

Trends 24h

News/Politics 2024-03-27T16:45:54.081Z
News/Politics 2024-03-28T06:04:53.137Z

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.