Prince Harry has lost his high-profile press-intrusion lawsuit against one of the UK’s most powerful newspaper groups.
The Duke of Sussex, alongside other claimants including Liz Hurley and Elton John, accused The Daily Mail publisher of unlawful information gathering, including “abhorrent criminal activity and gross breaches of privacy.”
All the claims have been dismissed, with High Court Judge Mr Justice Nicklin saying that the aggrieved parties had failed to prove their allegations.
A summary of the judgment read: “The Court rejected the attempt to prove the claims by broad inference where there remained a legitimate and realistic possible lawful source pathway, or where the article-specific evidence did not prove that the relevant information must have been obtained unlawfully.”
The lawsuit further alleged that Associated Newspapers commissioned individuals to listen to private telephone calls, paid police officials “with corrupt links to private investigators” for inside information and impersonated individuals to obtain medical records.
Associated Newspapers said the claims were “preposterous smears which appear to be nothing more than a pre-planned and orchestrated attempt to drag the Mail titles into the phone hacking scandal concerning articles up to 30 years old.”
Prince Harry was in the UK for the verdict, with the ruling coinciding with a London event for the Invictus Games. He gave evidence during the trial earlier this year, accusing Associated Newspapers of making Meghan Markle’s life “a misery.”
In a statement, Prince Harry attacked the ruling as a “whitewash.” He said:
We came to court seeking justice and accountability. But we have received neither. This judgment represents a complete reversal of the position which previous judges have taken in relation to the hacking claims successfully brought against both News Group Newspapers and Mirror Group Newspapers (who were represented by, at the time, the Judge who made this decision).
Generic findings about various private investigators that were held by the Courts in these parallel claims to have carried out unlawful activity at the very same time in relation to similar stories and well-known individuals have been wholly ignored.
The fact that this Court has chosen to dismiss them represents an inconsistency which is hard to understand or reconcile with common sense, or the evidence heard in the courtroom itself.
It is a complete and obvious whitewash, but sadly not altogether unexpected.However, the lengths to which the court has gone to exonerate the Mail is as shocking as it is totally unwarranted.
When the court says there is not sufficient evidence of wrongdoing, despite the documents showing otherwise, then one does wonder how justice was ever going to be achieved.
One need not look past when a private investigator the Mail used actually admitted on tape to having unlawfully blagged Baroness Lawrence, or when a journalist recorded the name of the private investigators she used to find out about highly sensitive medical information (that even the Mail was too worried to publish) or when another private investigator emailed one of the journalists with the actual British Airways seat number and ticketing details for a young girl simply visiting her boyfriend in return for payment.
It feels here like one rule for the newspapers and another for the claimants. While the Claimants presented evidence, Mail journalists simply gave denials, and the Court chose uncritically to believe them, even in the face of inconsistencies, contradictions and blatant untruths that were obvious to neutral observers in Court when compared to the documents.
We presented to the court evidence which we believed was compelling at the time and remains so now.
We would like to thank our legal team for all their hard work and all the witnesses who were brave enough to come forward in the pursuit of justice.
In a statement, Associated Newspapers said:
Associated Newspapers welcomes today’s judgement, which is an overwhelming victory for the Daily Mail and its journalists, and for a free press generally.
Mr Justice Nicklin today cleared The Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday, and dismissed every single one of the 97 allegations made by the claimants. In every case, the Judge accepted the honesty of our journalists’ evidence on how they sourced their stories. This is a magnificent vindication of the Daily Mail’s journalism.
For some of the most outrageous allegations made when the case was launched in a blaze of publicity four years ago – placing bugs in people’s cars and homes, listening to calls as they were made and illicitly accessing bank accounts – no credible evidence was ever presented.
As we said at the time, these allegations were ‘lurid’ and ‘preposterous,’ and were a fishing expedition by the claimants and their legal teams in a politically motivated campaign to muzzle the free press.
The reputations of our decent and hard-working journalists were terribly impugned, and today they have been exonerated. As the judgement clearly shows, every single article was legitimately sourced.
Associated Newspapers thanks Mr Justice Nicklin for the patience and wisdom he has displayed throughout this misguided legal action, which has wasted so much valuable court time and more than £50m in legal costs.
We will look to resolve outstanding issues, including the recovery of the costs we have incurred while defending ourselves against this egregious litigation.”
