Harry says some journalists have ‘blood on their hands’

Prince gets day in court against UK tabloid press

LONDON — Prince Harry finally got his day in court against the British tabloid press that he has long reviled, taking the stand in London on Tuesday to accuse the Mirror Newspaper Group of hacking his cellphone more than a decade ago.

Through five hours of polite but persistent grilling, Harry stood by his claims that the Mirror Group’s reporters intercepted his voicemail messages and used other unlawful means to dig up personal information about him, creating an atmosphere of distrust and even paranoia that has shadowed him since childhood.

It was a spectacle both extraordinary and ordinary: Harry, 38, the second son of King Charles III and the first prominent royal to testify in more than a century, declared that editors and journalists “have blood on their hands” because of the lengths to which they went to ferret out news about him and his family, not least his mother, Diana, who died in a car crash in 1997 after being pursued by photographers.

Yet for all the celebrity of the plaintiff, the scene in the packed High Court took on the rhythms of any other legal proceeding, as Harry’s cross-examination got underway. A lawyer for the Mirror Group, Andrew Green, repeatedly pressed him for hard evidence that its journalists had hacked his phone. Much of the information that Harry said was illegally obtained was available from other sources, he argued.

Harry, speaking in modulated and measured tones, insisted there was no way the Mirror’s reporters could have so quickly discovered his whereabouts, or the details of a schoolyard injury, without resorting to illegal methods.

“Are we not in the realm of total speculation?” Green said to Harry about his theory that the Mirror had hacked his doctor’s phone to obtain details about a thumb he broke while a student at Eton College.

“No,” Harry replied, adding, “I’m not the one who wrote the article, so you will have to ask the journalist who wrote the article.”

Still, there were also dramatic moments when Harry was able to make a broader point about how the tabloid press treats people like him. Asked by Green if the public had an interest in knowing about his youthful drug use — an issue extravagantly covered in the pages of The Daily Mirror — Harry shot back: “There’s a difference between public interest and what interests the public.”

Harry is one of four plaintiffs in this case, one of only two lawsuits rooted in the phone hacking scandal of 2011 that has made it all the way to trial. He is the first senior royal to testify in court since 1891, when the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, testified in the case of a man accused of cheating at a game of baccarat.

For the prince, whose reputation in Britain has been tarnished by his bitter rupture with the royal family, the trial was a rare opportunity to take a stand against a news media that has its own checkered reputation. Beyond the charges in the case, Harry views the trial as a platform to call for a sweeping reform of the British press.

In written testimony submitted by his lawyers, Harry said the state of the British press, like that of the British government, was at “rock bottom.” His blunt comment was yet another precedent-shattering move: Royals, by custom, never wade into political commentary.

To prevail on the legal case, however, Harry will have to convince the judge, Timothy Fancourt, that the Mirror Group intercepted his voicemail messages and those of people close to him, and used other unlawful means to gather information. Proving hacking could be a high bar, given how much time has passed since the Mirror articles cited by Harry were published.

In a filing, Harry’s lawyers wrote that he often experienced “suspicious” activity on his phone, including missed calls or hangups, from numbers he did not recognize or that were concealed. But the lawyers conceded that after so many years, he could not recall the dates on which this activity occurred.

The Mirror denies that it hacked Harry’s phone, or those of the three other plaintiffs.