The highly anticipated court case between Prince Harry and the publisher of the Daily Mirror began on Monday, but the Prince was notably absent. This raised concern from Justice Timothy Fancourt, who had previously directed Harry to attend the opening statements on the first day of this trial. However, Harry’s counsel stated that he had left for Los Angeles after celebrating his daughter Lilibet’s second birthday on Sunday and would not be available to testify until after the opening statements. Mirror Group Newspaper’s lawyer, Andrew Green, expressed disappointment with Harry’s absence. Green accused Harry of “wasting time” in the court case, as reported by the BBC.
The case against Mirror Group is the first of several lawsuits against the media by the prince to go to trial, with three alleging tabloid publishers unlawfully snooped on him in their cutthroat competition for scoops on the royal family. Harry’s lawyer, David Sherborne, claimed that the publisher used phone hacking and forms of unlawful information gathering on such a vast scale that it was implausible the publisher’s newspapers used a private investigator to dig up dirt on the prince just once, as they have admitted.
Sherborne further stated that stories about Harry were big sellers for the newspapers, with around 2,500 articles covering all aspects of his life. “Nothing was sacrosanct or out of bounds,” added Sherborne. Mirror Group, however, maintains that it used documents, public statements, and sources to legally report on the prince.
During the trial, Harry is set to testify and will be the first member of the British royal family to do so in over a century. He is likely to describe his anguish and anger over being hounded by the media throughout his life and its impact on those around him. The articles at issue in the trial date back to his 12th birthday in 1996, when the Mirror reported that Harry was feeling “badly” about the divorce of his parents, now King Charles III and the late Princess Diana.
Harry had blamed paparazzi for causing the car crash that killed his mother and claimed that 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. Mirror Group Newspapers stated that it did not hack Harry’s phone, and its articles were based on legitimate reporting techniques.
The trial is expected to be a tough audience for Harry’s claims, and his fury at the UK press, along with his own royal relatives, for what he perceives as their collaboration with the media, runs through his memoir, Spare, and interviews conducted by Oprah Winfrey and others.
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