Prince Harry returned to the accusation against a tabloid press, which he accuses of having practiced wiretapping on an “industrial scale” in the past, during the trial in London on Wednesday against a tabloid.
during this second day of testimonyThe 38-year-old prince’s testimony ended in the early afternoon. It was the first appearance by a member of the royal family on the stand since that of the future Edward VII in 1891 for a libel suit.
“Certain Injustice”
The youngest son of Carlos III, at odds with the royal family, has been involved in several legal battles against the tabloid press. In the ongoing trial, which began last month and is scheduled to last several more weeks, Harry accuses the newspaper’s editor daily mirror of using illegal methods to gather information, including voicemail hacking, between 1996 and 2010.
“Phone hacking was practiced on an industrial scale by at least three newspapers at the time, and there is no doubt about that,” the Duke of Sussex dropped on Wednesday morning, on the second day of his testimony.
If the court did not recognize this, Harry would “feel a certain injustice”, he added. The prince also explained that “hate” towards him and his wife Meghan, with whom he went into exile in California in 2020, was one of his motivations for this trial.
“Speculation”
On Wednesday morning, Andrew Green, MGN’s lawyer – who, in addition to the daily mirror, post sunday mirror AND sunday people – continued to question the prince in detail about the controversial items, like the day before, asking for evidence of illegal practices.
The first mentioned, published in 2005, revealed that Harry, then a trainee officer in the army, had been “exempt from daily marches” of five miles due to a knee injury.
For Andrew Green, Harry’s allegations about his voicemail being hacked are “speculation.” “Not at all,” the prince reacted. As reported by guardianAndrew Green ended his questioning by stating that Harry did not have a single piece of evidence that his email was hacked.
“I remember calls that lasted a second and I remember a lot of people asking me if I got their voicemail. (…) When they told me it was hacking, it made sense,” Harry said.
The prince also accused MGN of “large-scale destruction of evidence”.
33 articles published in the daily mirror are at the center of this test. Much of her day was devoted to articles published during her relationship with her former partner, Chelsy Davy. A relationship that has been widely broadcast by the tabloid press, which the Duke of Sussex suffered at the time.
One of the articles claimed that the prince spent “15 minutes a day” emailing his girlfriend from a computer room at Sandhurst, the military academy where he was staying.
“I don’t see how anyone could have known that,” the prince said, when asked by the lawyer if he believed the information came from illegal information gathering.
He pointed to several articles that provide disturbing details of his phone conversations that he says were obtained illegally.
It was then David Sherborne, Prince Harry’s lawyer, who asked him questions. Asked how he felt during a day and a half of reliving those years surrounded by tabloids, Prince Harry, who sometimes seemed tired during the day, seemed touched.
“That’s a lot,” he said, his voice cracking slightly, according to several British newspapers.
Harry left the witness box in the middle of the afternoon, but not from the High Court of Justice. He remained in the courtroom to attend the questioning of Jane Kerr, a former journalist for the daily mirror.
For several hours, Prince Harry’s lawyer went on the offensive. He asked the journalist about the private detectives he used during his years on the editorial team: he would have contacted a private detective agency no fewer than 900 times, The Guardian reports.
Jane Kerr tried to evade her obligation to provide evidence last week before being forced to comply with her subpoena today. She admitted that she didn’t want to come.
He often evoked vague memories of these contacts, claiming that he had never knowingly used illegally obtained information.
“You sign a statement saying you never called a private detective who obtained information illegally,” David Sherborne told him. “But how can you sign the statement if you’re not sure which detectives you contacted?”
If the Daily Mirror Group (MGN) already apologized for its practices at the time, Prince Harry will have to convince the judge in this trial that there was illegal information obtaining precisely in the 33 articles brought to trial.
The Duke of Sussex was hesitant at times when questioned by the press group’s lawyer, Andrew Green. On the other hand, he described more generally the intrusion of the tabloid press into his life, from a very early age, and his suffering and even his “paranoia” at the articles published about him.
He also denounced the “despicable” practices of certain newspapers, as he already did in a Netflix documentary in December and in his memoirs. alternatepublished in January.
Source: BFM TV
