Prince Harry vs the newspapers: this is what matters

Unless the plot takes a sudden and shocking twist, Prince Harry’s legal battle against the British tabloids for allegedly illegally intruding into his life reaches its most crucial moment on Tuesday, when The Sun And their claims against the long-defunct News of the World go to trial. ,

The plot twist will be the settlement of their massive case against their parent, News Group Newspapers (NGN), the British press arm of the media empire founded by Rupert Murdoch.

Is it a possibility? You’ll have better chances when Harry and Meghan announce a weekly lifestyle column for The Sun on Sunday.

This would be the first time that News Group Newspapers has had to defend itself against allegations that its journalists and executives across the organization engaged in or knew about illegal news gathering techniques.

If it were to lose, and lose badly, a finding from a court of corporate-level wrongdoing would be a stark contrast to a longstanding defense that phone hacking was confined to the bad apples in a now-discontinued title.

Prince’s allegations of tabloid wrongdoing date back to 1996. Harry and his brother Prince William first learned they may have been targeted in 2006.

At the time, texting was still in its infancy and everyone left voicemails – and few tabloid journalists realized it was easy enough to be eavesdropped.

News of the World journalist Clive Goodman and a private investigator, Glenn Mulcair, were arrested and later jailed for intercepting voice mails on the phones of the princes’ associates.

Prince Harry says as the scandal deepened, he turned to NGN to settle the royal family’s claims under a “secret settlement” to avoid embarrassment in court. NGN’s lawyers have said this is “Alice in Wonderland stuff” – and the court has ruled that it has seen no evidence of such a backroom deal.

All these years, the Duke of Sussex has been in no mood to give up what has become a crusade against tabloid journalism. And so his case moves forward – and what happens over the next two months could define both the prince’s legacy and the future of the British journalism institution.

NGN had long ago apologized for illegal activities at News of the World and closed it down in 2011. It denies similar claims against The Sun and Duke’s broader accusation of a corporate-wide cover-up.

It has settled cases brought by approximately 1,300 claimants for approximately £1 billion, including legal costs.

This means it has sidelined potential trials from those who say newspapers ran stories that could only have been written with access to private or confidential sources of information that cannot be publicly known. Was.

There were only two claimants left in those settlements – one of them being Prince Harry.

When he presented his claim, he alleged that more than 200 articles published by NGN between 1996 and 2011 contained information collected through illegal means. The test will look at a sample of about 30 stories in detail.

Some of them will be covering his successful Mirror Group case in 2023 and, like that case, he will be giving evidence in person.

There would be hours of analysis on how The Sun got scoops like “Emotional Harry phoned Chelsea at midnight” – a story that had already been running about ten years earlier about his then-girlfriend, Chelsea Davy.

Further separate allegations would be made by the second claimant, Lord (Tom) Watson. The former Labor MP says his phone was targeted while he was investigating the Murdoch newspapers at the height of the scandal nearly 15 years ago.

Mr Justice Fancourt will decide whether any of NGN’s articles were the product of unlawful information gathering, such as fraudulent information obtained from phone companies or “blagged” information by private investigators.

In Prince Harry’s case, he will not rule on whether any phone hacking occurred because the legal time for Prince Harry to prosecute those charges had expired.

None of this is going to be easy in court.

The judge had repeatedly expressed his disappointment, referring to both sides as well-equipped armies refusing to concede any ground to the other.

And at no stage did Prince Harry feel like he was going to compromise, even though not doing so would have cost him huge financial losses.

If a claimant rejects a settlement offer and is later awarded reduced damages by a judge, they will have to pay both parties’ legal costs.

Prince Harry has been very open about what would shock him and why he was moving.

“The goal is accountability. It’s really that simple,” he told the audience at a New York Times event in December.

In simple terms, newsgroups have three lines of defense. It would be the first to argue that the time has run out for Harry to bring charges of unlawful information gathering.

Due to this his claim of mobile phone hacking was rejected.

Second, its lawyers will, article by article, examine Duke’s claims that the information in them comes from questionable sources.

Third, the news group has lined up witnesses to refute Prince Harry and Lord Watson’s widespread allegations that top officials knew what was going on and were complicit in the mass destruction of allegedly incriminating records in 2011.

While the celebrity focus will inevitably be on the prince when he takes the witness box, the third allegation of cover-up is the most significant element of the trial.

While Prince Harry’s wallet will be hit hard, the damage to NGN’s reputation – and that of its executives – will be even greater if the court finds they were involved.

Current CEO Rebekah Brooks is among the executives the claimants will accuse of wrongdoing. He was found not guilty of conspiracy to hack voicemails in a seismic 2014 trial that ended with the jailing of his former colleague, News of the World editor and David Cameron’s communications chief Andy Coulson.

The other is Will Lewis. He played a key role in the management of the hacking crisis in 2011. He is now CEO of the Washington Post – an appointment that has been opposed by many at the newspaper because of this association.

He and others deny wrongdoing.

Will they give evidence? A spokesperson for NGN said: “Both claimants allege the unlawful destruction of emails by News International between 2010-2011. This allegation is false, unsustainable and is strongly denied by NGN technologists, Will call a number of witnesses, including lawyers and senior staff, to defeat the claim.”

Exactly what evidence Prince Harry brings to prove this claim – and what NGN says in defense – could define the entire battle.

Tuesday is really the beginning of the end. And someone is going to lose – and lose big.