Prince Harry says his decision to take on the British tabloids contributed to his rift with the royal family.
King Charles III’s second-born son, who is fifth in the line of succession, famously took Mirror Group Newspapers to court and battled it out over a phone-hacking scandal for years. The prince — who blasted his kin in his scathing 2023 memoir, bombshell Oprah Winfrey interview and Netflix documentary series — confirmed that the protracted legal battles took a toll on his relationship with his family.
“Yeah, that’s certainly a central piece to it,” the 39-year-old Duke of Sussex said in the ITV1 documentary “Tabloids on Trial.” His sit-down, which airs Thursday in the U.K., is Harry’s first in-depth interview since he won his case against the publisher of the Daily Mirror late last year.
“But, you know, that’s a hard 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 his wife and family to California. “I’ve made it very clear that this is something that needs to be done. It’d be nice if we did it as a family. I believe, again, from a service standpoint 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.”
A U.K. court awarded Harry $180,000 in December after he filed suit against Mirror Group Newspapers. Upon reaching a payout agreement in February, MGN apologized “unreservedly” for the “historical wrongdoing.”
Harry, who still has cases pending against publishers of the Daily Mail and the Sun, said that he doesn’t think there’s anybody in the world “better suited to see this through” and that he was “trying to get justice for everybody.” He said he felt “vindicated” by the judge’s favorable ruling in December.
“To go in there and come out and have the judge rule in our favor was obviously huge,” he said. “But for him to go as far as he did with regard to, you know, this wasn’t just the individual people. This went right up to the top. This was lawyers, this was high executives. And to be able to achieve that in a trial that’s a monumental victory.”
The one-hour documentary highlights Harry’s testimonial as well as interviews with other scandal-worn celebrities, including actor Hugh Grant, singer-actor Charlotte Church and soccer player Paul Gascoigne. “Tabloids on Trial” explores the unlawful information-gathering tactics that British media used to access the voicemail accounts of celebrities and other public figures and how they resulted in invasion of privacy cases.
The Invictus Games founder said in the documentary that it seemed as though the tabloids, which meticulously chronicled his personal life and scandals, knew some things about him before he even did, and that he felt “paranoia and fear and worry, concern, distrust” of the people around him.
“There’s a big difference between what interests the public and what is public interest,” he said. The prince also noted how the tabloid press affected his late mother, Princess Diana, whom he believed was being hacked in the mid-’90s before her death in a Paris car crash in 1997.
“Still today the tabloid press very much enjoy painting her as being paranoid, but she wasn’t paranoid,” he said. “She was absolutely right of [sic] what was happening to her and she’s not around today to find out the truth.”
