Prince Harry cast himself as the “last person” who could hold Britain’s tabloids to account for years of predatory conduct during the phone hacking scandal. On Wednesday, he settled for a partial victory in his lonely campaign.
Harry settled a long-running lawsuit with Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers over unlawful information gathering, winning a multimillion dollar payout and, perhaps more significantly, an admission of “unlawful” conduct by private investigators hired by The Sun, the company’s flagship tabloid.
But the settlement averted what could have been weeks of damaging testimony about phone hacking and other unlawful practices News Group used more than a decade ago to ferret out personal information about Harry and other prominent figures. Harry, who did not appear in court on Wednesday, was scheduled to take the stand next month.
It also marked the end of an era of high-profile legal cases stemming from the hacking scandal, a dark period in the history of British media, and gave Harry a long-awaited acknowledgment of the tabloids’ acute intrusion into the life of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, who died in a car accident in Paris in 1997 while being pursued by photographers.
News Group Newspapers offered a “full and unequivocal apology” for hacking his cellphone and intruding into his personal life and that of Diana, “in particular during his younger years.”
“We acknowledge and apologize for the distress caused to the duke, and the damage inflicted on relationships, friendships and family, and have agreed to pay him substantial damages,” the company said in a contrite, five-paragraph statement, referring to Harry by his formal title, the Duke of Sussex.
The settlement, announced a day after the trial was set to begin in a London High Court, spared Harry, 40, the younger son of King Charles III, from heavy financial risk. Under English law, aimed at resolving disputes out of court where possible, Harry would have been required to pay the legal costs of both sides unless the court awarded him an amount equal to what News Group offered him in the settlement.
While neither side disclosed the amount of the financial settlement, it was worth at least 10 million pounds ($12.3 million), according to two people with knowledge of the negotiation. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the parties had agreed not to disclose the number.
An 11th-hour settlement to avert a trial
The last minute deal underscored the unforgiving economics for private individuals taking on deep-pocketed corporations in Britain. Mr. Murdoch’s companies have used lucrative payoffs to avert trials in 1,300 cases stemming from the phone hacking scandal. Harry’s elder brother, Prince William, settled for a “huge sum of money” in 2020, according to a filing by Harry in his own case.
In April, the actor Hugh Grant said that he had felt forced to settle his hacking case against News Group Newspapers because “even if every allegation is proven in court, I would still be liable for something approaching 10 million pounds in costs. I’m afraid I am shying at that fence.”
In the United States, Mr. Murdoch’s Fox News paid $787.5 million in April 2023 to settle a defamation suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems over the cable network’s promotion of false claims about Dominion’s voting machines in the 2020 election.
News Group Newspapers said Wednesday that after a decade of hacking-related lawsuits, the settlement “draws a line under the past and brings an end to this litigation.” It noted that the judge in the case, Timothy Fancourt, said these cases were the last with a good chance of getting to trial.
News Group also apologized and paid damages to Harry’s fellow plaintiff, Tom Watson, a former deputy leader of the Labour Party, for what it described as “the unwarranted intrusion” into his private life by The News of The World between 2009 and 2011, during his time in government. The company admitted he had been “placed under surveillance” in 2009 by the tabloid.
Mr. Murdoch shut down The News of the World in 2011 after it emerged that the paper had illegally hacked the voice mail of a murdered schoolgirl. Until now, though, the company had never acknowledged wrongdoing by anyone at The Sun. News Group emphasized that the admission of unlawful conduct referred to private investigators hired by the paper between 1996 and 2011, not to its journalists.
Still, the acknowledgment is significant because Rebekah Brooks, the current chief executive of News U.K., was the editor of The Sun from 2003 to 2009 and had described it to a parliamentary hearing on phone hacking as a “very clean ship.” Ms. Brooks has denied all wrongdoing and was cleared of criminal charges in a hacking case in 2014.
“For the first time in this long running litigation, and despite repeated previous denials, the flagship Murdoch title, The Sun, has had to make an unprecedented admission,” said Daniel Taylor, a media lawyer who has represented plaintiffs in other hacking cases. “It hired private investigators to carry out unlawful activities in relation to Prince Harry.”
Unanswered questions
The statement did not directly refer to Will Lewis, a former senior executive at News U.K. who is now the publisher of the Washington Post, but one paragraph raised questions about his role. In 2011, when the police were investigating the allegations of phone hacking and unlawful activity at News U.K., they confronted the company about why certain emails had been abruptly removed from its servers. Mr. Lewis told the police that the company removed them after receiving an unsubstantiated tip that Gordon Brown, a former prime minister, was plotting with allies, including Mr. Watson, to steal the emails of Ms. Brooks.
In its apology to Mr. Watson, News Group admitted there were no grounds for that claim. “In 2011 News International received information that information was being passed covertly to Lord Watson from within News International. We now understand that this information was false, and Lord Watson was not in receipt of any such confidential information,” it said.
Mr. Watson said in an interview last year that the claim had been “deliberately concocted by News International in an attempt to justify the destruction and concealment of millions of relevant emails during a criminal investigation.”
A spokesman for Mr. Lewis cited a statement he gave to The Times last June, in which he said, “Any allegations of wrongdoing are untrue.”
Speaking outside the courthouse after the settlement was announced, Mr. Watson said he would hand the police a dossier of evidence of wrongdoing. “I once said that the big beasts of the tabloid jungle have no predators,” he said. “I was wrong. They have Prince Harry. His bravery and astonishing courage have brought accountability to a part of the media that thought it was untouchable.”
Still, the settlement means that Harry will not testify about his treatment at the hands of Mr. Murdoch’s tabloids — something he did to dramatic effect in 2023, in a similar case against Mirror Group Newspapers, which he won. Nor will his lawyers present what they claim was widespread and deeply rooted misconduct at Mr. Murdoch’s tabloids.
In addition to intercepting voice mail messages and purging emails, Harry’s lawyers planned to argue that senior News Group editors encouraged journalists to misrepresent themselves to get access to intimate details about Harry, a practice known as “blagging.”
For Harry, resolving the case could remove a source of friction between him and his father and brother. Last year, he told ITV News that disagreements over how to deal with the tabloids had deepened the rift with his family, which was also rooted in the family’s treatment of his wife, Meghan.
Harry sharply criticized Charles and William for a “secret agreement,” under which the family agreed to defer legal claims against the publisher to avoid having to testify about embarrassing details from their intercepted voice mail messages. While Harry brought charges, he has now agreed to a similar accommodation.
In a summary of their planned argument, lawyers for Harry cited a text message he wrote to William in 2019, in which he said that he was “fed up with Pa’s office continually blocking it for us, plus I’ve recently found out the extent of their behaviour and subsequent cover-ups which needs to be exposed.”
Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace, where William has his offices, declined to comment on the settlement. A spokesman for Harry said he would not comment beyond the statement read by Mr. Sherborne.
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