Duke of Sussex Prince Harry has inflamed his war with Piers Morgan by personally attacking the TalkTV and Fox Nation presenter in explosive court testimony.
The Duke of Sussex Prince Harry was in the witness box today for the phone hacking trial he and other British celebrities are bringing against Mirror Group Newspapers, where Morgan worked as Editor of The Daily Mirror for nearly a decade.
In a written statement to London’s High Court, Prince Harry said the thought of Morgan prying on the private correspondence of his late mother, Princess Diana, made him feel “physically sick.”
He added that Morgan’s repeated attacks on himself and his wife, Meghan Markle, were an effort to bully him out of bringing legal action against Mirror Group Newspapers. Morgan has consistently denied any knowledge of phone hacking at the Mirror, which he edited from 1995 to 2004.
“The thought of Piers Morgan and his band of journalists earwigging into my mother’s private and sensitive messages (in the same way as they have me) and then having given her a ‘nightmare time’ three months prior to her death in Paris, makes me feel physically sick,” Duke of Sussex Prince Harry said.
“Unfortunately, as a consequence of me bringing my Mirror Group claim, both myself and my wife have been subjected to a barrage of horrific personal attacks and intimidation from Piers Morgan”, he said, adding that the attacks were done in the hope “I will back down.”
Prince Harry is the first senior member of the British royal family to be cross-examined in court since the 19th century. He trashed the “vile” behavior of British tabloids and said press intrusion has had a “devastating impact on our mental health and wellbeing.”
Earlier in the legal proceedings, the High Court was told last month that Morgan openly discussed phone hacking in front of colleagues on Mirror Group Newspapers premises.
Former Mirror political editor David Seymour told the court how Morgan played a Paul McCartney voicemail to reporters, in which the Beatles star attempted to patch up his relationship with then-girlfriend Heather Mills by singing And I Love Her.
The trial has reignited the phone hacking debate in the UK more than a decade after Rupert Murdoch shut down the News of the World amid revelations about unlawful activity.
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 made a mission of holding the U.K. press to account for what he sees as its hounding of him and his family.
Setting out the prince’s case in court 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.