Prince Harry's historic showdown with the publisher of a British tabloid has exposed his deep suspicions of the press but offered little concrete evidence to support accusations of phone hacking that he says caused so much anguish in his life.
The Duke of Sussex became the first senior member of the royal family to testify in more than a century as he held a Bible in his right hand and, in a soft voice, swore to tell the "whole truth and nothing but the truth" in the High Court in London on Tuesday.
Harry accuses the publisher of the Mirror of using unlawful techniques on an "industrial scale" to get scoops.
Dressed in a dark suit and tie, he arrived at court in a black SUV and entered a modern wing of the court past dozens of photographers and TV cameras.
Sitting in the witness box, Harry told Mirror Group attorney Andrew Green he had "experienced hostility from the press since I was born". The prince accused the tabloids of playing "a destructive role in my growing-up".
Green apologised for the one instance Mirror Group has admitted to hiring a private investigator to dig up dirt on Harry, which was not among the claims he has brought.
Mirror Group denies or doesn't admit his other allegations, which relate to 33 published articles.
Green acknowledged the duke had "lived a life of tabloid life intrusion" and then in a sympathetic tone set about dismantling his case.
Taken back in time to his 12th birthday and onward through early adulthood, he was confronted with articles that he has complained about and asked to identify the source of wrongdoing by Mirror Groups's journalists.
'Every single article has caused me distress'
Harry was forced almost immediately to acknowledge he couldn't recall specific articles he was complaining about. Green pressed him on how they could have caused such distress if he couldn't remember having read them at the time.
"Is it realistic, when you have been the subject of so much press intrusion by so many press, both domestic and international, to attribute specific distress to a particular article from 20 years ago, which you may not have seen at the time?" Green asked.
"It isn't a specific article, it is all of the articles," Harry replied.
"Every single article has caused me distress."
He suggested the articles were the result of phone hacking or some other unlawful information gathering method that "desperate journalists" relied on for any news nugget about his life.
Impact on friends and relationships
His case dates from 1996 to 2011 — a period when phone hacking by tabloid journalists was later discovered to be widespread. It led to later revelations of more intrusive means such as phone tapping, home bugging and obtaining bank and medical records by deception.
Harry said the articles caused him to become depressed and paranoid, distrustful of friends, who he feared were feeding information to the media.
His circle of friends shrank, relationships fell apart and he felt constantly in the glare of the journalists who were shaping the narrative of his life.
"I genuinely feel that in every relationship that I've ever had – be that with friends, girlfriends, with family or with the army, there's always been a third party involved, namely the tabloid press," Harry said in a written witness statement released Tuesday, which claimed it felt like the press thought they "owned" him.
Green asked him to identify what evidence he had of phone hacking in specific articles, and Harry said he'd have to ask that question of the journalist who wrote it. He repeatedly said that the manner in which information had been obtained was highly or incredibly suspicious.
He said some of the journalists had been known for hacking or there were invoices to third parties, including private investigators known for snooping, around the time of the articles.
He suggested other records had been destroyed.
'That's just speculation you've come up with now'
Time and again, Green laid out evidence to the contrary and said what was described by Harry as a nefarious act had a more innocent explanation.
When asked how reporters could have hacked his phone for an article about his 12th birthday — a time when he admitted he didn't have a mobile phone — he suggested they may have hacked the phone of his mother, the late Princess Diana.
"That's just speculation you've come up with now," Green suggested.
In the same article, Green pointed out that a reference to him taking his parent's divorce badly was obvious.
"Like most children I think, yes," Harry said.
But the prince said it was not legitimate to report such information and "the methods in which it was obtained seem incredibly suspicious".
Green then pointed out that his mother previously made public comments to reporters about the difficulties of her children after the divorce.
The court heard information about his 18th birthday came from his own mouth and, apparently, palace press people who set up an interview with him and the Press Association, which was widely used or quoted in many papers, including the Daily Mirror.
A Daily Mirror story headlined "Snap, Harry breaks thumb like William" in 2000 came from a spokesperson at his father's office, which had given the Press Association the news the day before.
Harry remained steadfast that the paper's former royal editor, Jane Kerr, who is due to testify Wednesday, relied on some unlawful means to report the story.
"Probably herself or she got someone else to do her dirty work for her," he said.
When asked whose phone she hacked, Harry suggested it could have been the doctor's.
"Are you not in the realms of total speculation?" Green said.
"No, I do not believe so," Harry said.
First senior royal to testify since 19th century
The 38-year-old son of King Charles III is the first senior British royal since the 19th century to face questioning in a court. An ancestor, the future King Edward VII, appeared as a witness in a trial over a gambling scandal in 1891.
Harry has said the royal family avoided legal entanglements to prevent having to be put in the witness box.
But he has made a mission of holding the UK press to account for what he sees as its hounding of him and his family.
Setting out the prince's case in court on Monday, his lawyer, David Sherborne, said that from Harry's childhood, British newspapers used hacking and subterfuge to mine snippets of information that could be turned into front-page scoops.
He said stories about Harry were big sellers for the newspapers, and about 2500 articles had covered all facets of his life during the time period of the case — 1996 to 2011 — from injuries at school to experimenting with marijuana and cocaine to ups and downs with girlfriends.
"Nothing was sacrosanct or out of bounds" for the tabloids, the lawyer said.
Phone hacking, an existential crisis for the media
Hacking — the practice of guessing or using default security codes to listen to celebrities' cellphone voice messages — was widespread at British tabloids in the early years of this century.
It became an existential crisis for the industry after the revelation in 2011 that the News of the World had hacked the phone of a slain 13-year-old girl. Owner Rupert Murdoch shut down the paper and several of his executives faced criminal trials.
Mirror Group has paid more than £100 million ($125 million) to settle hundreds of unlawful information-gathering claims, and printed an apology to phone hacking victims in 2015.
Defence lawyer Green said Monday there was "simply no evidence capable of supporting the finding that the Duke of Sussex was hacked, let alone on a habitual basis". He said he plans to question Harry for a day and a half.
Harry had been expected in court Monday for the opening of the hacking case, the first of his several lawsuits against the media to go to a full trial.
Fergie joins royal family at Sandringham for first time in decades
He was absent because he’d taken a flight Sunday from Los Angeles after the birthday of his two-year-old daughter Lilibet, Sherborne said — to the evident chagrin of the judge, Timothy Fancourt.
“I’m a little surprised,” said Fancourt, noting he had directed Harry to be prepared to testify.
Harry’s fury at the UK press — and sometimes at his own royal relatives for what he sees as their collusion with the media — runs through his memoir, Spare, and interviews conducted by Oprah Winfrey and others.
He has blamed paparazzi for causing the car crash that killed his mother, Princess Diana, and said harassment and intrusion by the UK press, including allegedly racist articles, led him and his wife, Meghan, to flee to the US in 2020 and leave royal life behind.
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