Prince Harry was back on the witness stand today.
The Duke of Sussex was in London to give testimony against the parent company of the Daily Mail tabloid.
“They continue to come after me,” he told the court at one point, his voice cracking. “They have made my wife’s life an absolute misery.”
Here are the things you need to know from the royal’s latest day in court.
Why is Prince Harry in court again?
This is round three in the duke’s series of lawsuits against various British tabloids, all pegged to his belief that they used illegal means — like hacking into his voicemail, for example — to get stories on him. He’s won favourable judgments in his previous outings: The parent company of the Sun offered a full apology and an alleged 10-million-pound settlement, while his case against the Mirror saw more than 140,000 pounds in damages and the High Court finding evidence of “habitual and widespread” phone hacking at the tabloid.
This particular case is against Associated Newspapers Limited, the parent company of the Daily Mail newspaper. He’s part of a group of celebrities, including Liz Hurley and Sir Elton John, suing the publisher claiming “grave breaches of privacy” over a two-decade period around the turn of the millennium.
Associated Newspapers Limited denies all wrongdoing and has called the claims in this civil (not criminal) suit “preposterous.”
Why is Prince Harry suing the Daily Mail’s parent company?
Prince Harry’s specific claims centre on 14 articles that were published in the paper between 2001 and 2013. They include stories detailing the exact seat his then-girlfriend Chelsy Davy was sitting in on a plane ride, and how he and Prince William felt about the publication in the Italian press of a photograph of his mother, Diana, dying after the car she was riding in crashed in a Paris tunnel in 1997.
His basic argument is that there is no way the paper could have gotten the stories without resorting to “unlawful information gathering.” By this, he’s referring to the use of private investigators to do things like hack into voice mails, pretend to be someone they’re not to “blag” information or even plant bugs in cars or homes.
The journalists behind the pieces — Katie Nicholl and Rebecca English, both still prominent voices in the world of royal reportage and commentary — disagree, claiming they got this information through legitimate sources.
In fact, lawyers for the newspaper say that Harry’s own friends were often the source of these bits of information. It’s something he denied when he took the stand. “My social circles were not leaky,” he said. In fact, he had a practice of “cutting off” anyone he suspected might be leaking stories to the press.
More broadly and existentially, Prince Harry says that he is bringing this case for “the public interest,” the final legal chapter (for now) in his long-running campaign against the tabloid press that kicked off with his open letter back in 2016, when he called out the tabloids for negative coverage of Meghan Markle that he believed was putting her in danger.
It’s a note that he returned to on the stand today, telling the judge that the Daily Mail’s treatment of her has “only got worse…They have made my wife’s life an absolute misery, My Lord.”
What did Prince Harry say on the stand today?
There were a few noteworthy tidbits from Prince Harry’s cross-examination by the publisher’s lawyer today.
One of the paper’s central defences has been that the claimants have taken too long to bring their case. Refuting this, Prince Harry said that he simply had no idea until he left the Royal Family in 2020 that these stories might have been sourced unlawfully.
“It is not an exaggeration to say the bubble burst in terms of what I knew,” he said, adding that there may very well be other royals who have also been targets of this alleged unlawful information gathering.
He also laid out how the press intrusion into his relationships impacted his girlfriends. Of a 2013 article that claimed he was “facing a lonely New Year’s Eve” without then-girlfriend Cressida Bonas, he said it was “creepy” and a “horrible existence for a young girl to be stalked like this.” He speculated that they “tracked her or blagged information about her flight, and would have had her under surveillance like they did my other girlfriends.”
Similarly, he claimed that a story about him being in love with another girlfriend, Chelsy Davy, had to have been the product of someone hacking his voicemail rather than the sources the tabloid claims passed on the info. “These three people have never shared anything with anybody,” Prince Harry refuted. “If they had, there would be a lot more out there.”
He also detailed the psychological toll this kind of press coverage, filled with stories that seemed like they were based on information only someone close to him would have, had on his state of mind.
It feels, he said, “like you’re constantly being watched, and you can’t trust anyone around you. It feels like every aspect of your life behind closed doors is being displayed to the world for amusement, entertainment and money.”
To that end, Prince Harry claimed in a written statement that the paper wanted to beat the competition so badly that it had “an obsession of having every aspect of my life under surveillance,” and tried to “drive me paranoid beyond belief, isolating me and probably wanting to drive me to drugs and drinking to sell more of their papers.”
When will the court reach a verdict?
While Prince Harry’s time on the witness stand appears to be done, it’s anticipated the trial itself will go for another eight weeks, with a judgment to come after that.
Will Prince Harry see King Charles while he’s in London?
It’s unlikely. He didn’t (as far as we know) see him when he was in town to give evidence at a previous trial, and it’s believed the King wants to keep distance between himself and this legal matter.
