Next week, Prince Harry will give testimony in his case against a media group he claims engaged in illegal activities, making him the first senior British royal to do so in 130 years.
King Charles’ younger son Harry will testify in the High Court in London. The case is in connection with the lawsuit he and more than 100 other well-known individuals have filed against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), the company that publishes the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, and Sunday People.
Since Edward VII testified as a witness in a divorce case in part in 1870 and in a slander trial involving a card game 20 years later, both of which occurred before he became king, no senior royal has testified in court.
Considering his legal disputes with the British press, and the controversy around the publication of his biography, and the Netflix documentary series in which he accused other senior royals of working with tabloid publications, Harry has hardly been out of the spotlight over the past six months.
Harry is also suing Rupert Murdoch’s Sun tabloid newspaper, which David Yelland, a senior communications adviser, formerly edited. Yelland claimed that the royal family had long sought to avoid legal disputes since they could not influence the situation. “These cases are often a case of mutually assured destruction. I don’t think anyone will get out looking great,” he remarked.
Harry and three others were chosen as test cases in the lawsuit filed by more than 100 people against MGN.
It has been informed in the trial court, which started last month, that MGN journalists or private investigators hired by them engaged in “industrial-scale” phone hacking and other illegal activities to learn more about the prince and the other claimants.
Senior editors and executives knew about and approved of this, according to the claimants’ attorney David Sherborne. Senior figures, according to MGN, who is disputing the charges, denied knowing anything about hacking and had any misconduct kept from them.
