Prince Harry’s lawyers are seeking to include new evidence into the litigation against tabloids using deceptive methods to break stories includes his late mother, Princess Diana, People reports.
According to the report by People, Prince Harry’s lawyers sought to include new claims in his privacy invasion lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers, according to the AP and Reuters.
Prince Harry wants to include evidence regarding unlawfully intercepted phone calls of his mother Princess Diana, his father King Charles (then the Prince of Wales) and Queen Camilla (then Camilla Parker Bowles), which surfaced in materials turned over by NGN.
Prince Harry’s lawyer, David Sherborne, said during a three-day hearing at the High Court in London this week that the phone tapping resulted in private information about Prince Harry being revealed dating back to when he was just 9, according to the AP.
“The defendant’s newspapers described his late mother’s concerns as ‘paranoid delusions,’ when the true position was that she was under close surveillance and her calls were being unlawfully intercepted by (NGN), which was known about by its editors and senior executives,” Sherborne said in court papers, the AP reported.
Prince Harry is suing NGN, publisher of The Sun and the now-defunct News of the World, over alleged invasions of privacy from the mid-1990s until 2016. NGN has denied Harry’s allegations, which claim he was targeted by journalists and private investigators. The case is likely to be heard at a trial in January 2025.
A judge dismissed another claim related to phone hacking over the summer, ruling that Prince Harry was aware of the tapping at News of the World and could have brought his case sooner. In the U.K., claimants usually have six years after a privacy breach to take action.
However, the Duke of Sussex said in a witness statement in another lawsuit against Associated Newspapers Ltd. that he had to follow the royal family’s policy of “never complain, never explain” when dealing with the media, adding that information was withheld from him.
“The Institution was without a doubt withholding information from me for a long time about NGN’s phone hacking and that has only become clear in recent years as I have pursued my own claim with different legal advice and representation,” he said.
“It is not an exaggeration to say that the bubble burst in terms of what I knew in 2020 when I moved out of the United Kingdom,” Harry added, referring to when he and his wife, Meghan Markle, relocated to her home state of California after stepping back as working members of the royal family.
In recent years, Prince Harry has been involved in four lawsuits against U.K. tabloids, alleging phone hacking, illegal information gathering and libel.
The Duke of Sussex made history last year when he gave evidence from the witness stand in his case against Mirror Group Newspapers as he became the first prominent member of the British royal family to give evidence in court in 130 years. The last royal family member to do so was King Edward VII, who testified as a witness in an 1870 divorce case and again in an 1890 slander trial over a card game, both taking place before he acceded to the throne.