Prince William settled a phone-hacking claim against Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper group in 2020 for a “very large sum”.
The shocking news lawyers for Prince Harry revealed in court documents. Prince Harry has released an extraordinary witness statement, that will send even more shcokwaves through the British establishment.
Prince Harry is suing News Group Newspapers (NGN), publisher of The Sun and the now-closed down News Of The World, over alleged unlawful information gathering at its titles.
Tampongate
Harry claims there was a secret agreement struck between royal family and “senior executives” at Murdoch’s company at some point before 2012.
As part of this supposed deal the princes would delay legal proceedings against the newspaper group.
Harry said the royal family did this after being scarred by the “Tampongate” incident when the Sun obtained a recorded phone call between Prince Charles and Camilla while the couple were having an affair in the 1980s.
Harry said the royal family was desperate to avoid a repeat of this coverage. The filings state: “The reason for this was to avoid the situation where a member of the royal family would have to sit in the witness box and recount the specific details of the private and highly sensitive voicemails that had been intercepted by [the News of the World royal reporter] Clive Goodman.
“The institution was incredibly nervous about this and wanted to avoid at all costs the sort of reputational damage that it had suffered in 1993 when the Sun and another tabloid had unlawfully obtained and published details of an intimate telephone conversation that took place between my father and stepmother in 1989, while he was still married to my mother.”
Harry was perceived as ‘an idiot’
“It even got to the stage where the tabloids would routinely publish articles about me that were plainly wrong but interspersed with snippets of truth, which I now believe were most likely gleaned from voicemail interception and/or unlawful information gathering.
“This created an alternative and distorted version of me and my private life to the general public – people that I had to serve and interact with as part of my role in the Royal Family – to the point where any one of the thousands of people that I met or was introduced to on any given day, could easily have said ‘you know what, you’re an idiot. I’ve read all the stories about you and now I hate you and am going to stab you’.”
The tabloids hoped he would have a public breakdown
“Having seen me grow up from a baby (being born into this ‘contractual relationship’ without any choice) and scrutinised my every move, the tabloids have known the challenges and mental health struggles that I have had to deal with throughout my childhood and adult life, in large part created by them, and for them to then play on that and use it to their own advantage, while weaponising mental health, I think is truly appalling.”
Diana
“This sort of unlawful activity including phone tapping/hacking made her [Diana] distrust her protection officers as she thought they were leaking private information about her, which I believe is one of the reasons she insisted on not having any protection after the divorce (as I am told by the institution).
“If she’d had police protection with her in August 1997, she’d probably still be alive today. People who abuse their power like this need to face the consequences of their actions, otherwise it says that we can all behave like this.”
British people ‘brainwashed’ by tabloid press
“The fact they’re all ganging up to protect each other, like they first did after the Leveson Inquiry, is the most disturbing and dangerous part of it all. It is clear to me that the tabloid press are the mothership of online trolling. Trolls react and mobilise to stories they create, not the other way around, though plenty of headlines are knowingly created from troll accounts while giving the impression that this is what the UK public think and feel.
“This is brainwashing at the highest level. People die as a result of trolling, and people will continue to take their own lives when they can’t see any other way out. How much more blood will stain their typing fingers before someone can put a stop to this madness?”
Harry
While this is going on Harry and Meghan were having a laugh at the Basketball.
They got a big cheer on the big screen.
Related: King Charles’ fortune revealed as people question validity of coronation item
