Prince Harry says his decision to take on British tabloids contributed to his rift with the royal family.
The second son of King Charles III, who is fifth in line to the throne, took Mirror Group Newspapers to court and battled them for years over a phone-hacking scandal. The prince, who criticised his relatives in his scathing 2023 memoir, his explosive interview with Oprah Winfrey and his Netflix documentary series, confirmed the protracted legal battles had taken a toll on his relationship with his family.
“Yes, that's certainly a centrepiece,” the Duke of Sussex, 39, said in the ITV1 documentary “Tabloids on Trial.” His interview, which airs Thursday in the U.K., is Harry's first in-depth interview since winning his case against the Daily Mirror publisher late last year.
“But, you know, it’s a difficult question to answer because anything I say about my family results in a torrent of abuse from the press,” said the prince, who formally stepped back from royal duties in 2020 and moved with his wife and family to California. “I’ve made it very clear that this is something that needs to be done. It would be nice if we did it as a family. I think, again, from a service point of view and when you’re in a public role that these are the things that we should be doing for the greater good. But, you know, I’m doing this for my reasons.”
In December, a UK court awarded Harry $180,000 after he sued Mirror Group Newspapers. After reaching a payment agreement in February, MGN apologised “unreservedly” for “historical misconduct”.
Harry, who still has pending cases against the editors of the Daily Mail and the Sun, said he did not believe there was anyone in the world “more qualified to bring this to a successful conclusion” and that he was “trying to get justice for everyone”. He said he felt “vindicated” by the judge's ruling in December.
“The fact that the judge ruled in our favor was obviously a big deal,” he said. “But for it to go this far in terms of, you know, it wasn’t just about individual people. It was something that went all the way to the top — attorneys, senior executives. And to be able to accomplish that at trial is a monumental victory.”
The hour-long documentary features testimony from Harry as well as interviews with other celebrities who have been embroiled in scandals, including actor Hugh Grant, singer and actress Charlotte Church and footballer Paul Gascoigne. “Tabloids on Trial” explores the illegal information-gathering tactics used by British media to access the voicemail accounts of celebrities and other public figures and how they led to cases of invasion of privacy.
The Invictus Games founder said in the documentary that it seemed as if the tabloids, which meticulously chronicled his personal life and scandals, knew things about him before he did, and that he felt “paranoia, fear, worry, uneasiness, distrust” towards the people around him.
“There is a big difference between what interests the public and what is in the public interest,” he said. The prince also highlighted how the tabloid press affected his late mother, Princess Diana, who he says was the victim of computer attacks in the mid-1990s before her death in a car crash in Paris in 1997.
“Even today the tabloids still love to paint her as paranoid, but she wasn’t,” he said. “She was absolutely right in saying that. [sic] “I don’t know what was happening to her and she is not here today to find out the truth.”
