Prince Harry gets his day in court against tabloids he accuses of blighting his life

Harry alleges that journalists on the Daily Mirror and its sister papers used illegal methods on an “industrial scale” to get scoops.

The 38-year-old son of King Charles III would be the first British royal because the nineteenth century to face questioning in a court docket. An ancestor, the long run King Edward VII, appeared as a witness in a trial over a playing scandal in 1891.

Harry has made a mission of holding the UK press to account for what he sees as its hounding of him and his household.

Setting out the prince’s case in court docket on Monday, his lawyer, David Sherborne, mentioned that from Harry’s childhood, British newspapers used hacking and subterfuge to mine snippets of knowledge that could possibly be become front-page scoops.

He mentioned tales about Harry had been massive sellers for the newspapers, and a few 2500 articles had coated all aspects of his life in the course of the time interval of the case — 1996 to 2011 — from accidents in 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 mentioned.

Mirror Group’s lawyer, Andrew Green, mentioned there was “simply no evidence capable of supporting the finding that the Duke of Sussex was hacked, let alone on a habitual basis”.

Green said he plans to question Harry for a day and a half.

Harry has 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.

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,” mentioned Fancourt, noting he had directed Harry to be ready 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.