The Duke of Sussex was awarded damages of CA$238,918 in phone-hacking charges against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) on Friday in the London Royal Courts of Justice. Because the case was heard in civil rather than criminal court, there is no one will face jail time. The suit cited illegal information gathering between the years 1996 and 2010, concerning the publication of 148 articles, per BBC. Thirty-three were curated into a representative sample for the trial and the judge finally ruled 15 articles were “the product of phone hacking or the product of other unlawful information gathering.” Many of the stories in question were about the prince’s intimate life with former girlfriends such as Chelsy Davy and Caroline Flack. UK-based television host Piers Morgan, who was editor of the Daily Mirror between 1995 and 2004, was accused and found at fault of having knowledge his journalists were illegally obtaining information. Prince Harry, alongside three other high-profile claimants, Coronation Street actors Michael Turner and Nikki Sanderson and former wife of comedian Paul Whitehouse, Fiona Wightman, had sued the publishers of the parent company of Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Daily Express in a lawsuit filed October 2022, accusing MGN journalists of hacking his phone to write articles. Turner was awarded CA$53,695 in damages and the other two cases were dismissed on a technicality. The BBC reported Justice Timothy Fancourt found Harry’s phone was hacked in a “widespread and habitual” manner, though to a "modest extent," from 1996 to 2006, confirming journalists used deceptive and illegal tactics, such as intercepting voicemails, to breach his privacy.“I have found the duke's case of voicemail interception and unlawful information gathering proved in part only,” he said. “I found that 15 out of the 33 articles that were tried were the product of phone hacking of his mobile phone or the mobile phones of his associates or the product of other unlawful information-gathering.”“I consider that his phone was only hacked to a modest extent and that this was probably carefully controlled by certain people at each newspaper,” he continued. “However, it did happen on occasions from about the end of 2003 to April 2009.”“There was a tendency for the duke in his evidence to assume that everything published was the product of voicemail interception because phone hacking was rife within Mirror Group at the time," referring to the corporation's settlement-riddled past when it comes to civil privacy-breach cases. Fancourt noted Harry’s friends and former girlfriends were at a higher risk to have their privacy breached by journalists. Many of the articles published after illegal information gathering were related to Davy, who the prince dated on and off from 2004 to 2010. Finally the ruling was made and Harry awarded “for the distress that he suffered as a result of the unlawful activity directed at him and those close to him.”MGN lawyers had previously called the allegations “wildly overstated” and continued to deny any voicemail-hacking allegations, making the assertion too much time had lapsed since the alleged misconduct. However, in May, the corporation did apologize to the prince for one count of unlawful information gathering. The formal apology, which was included in court filings, said the group “unreservedly apologizes” for one particular instance involving a private investigator hired to follow Harry to a nightclub in London in 2004. Harry’s lawyer David Sherborne had argued there was “consistent and unusual telephone and media-related activity” throughout the years in question, with Harry receiving a high-volume of aborted calls “on an almost daily basis from numbers he did not recognize.”A spokeswoman for MGN said on Friday the parent company “welcomes today’s judgment” because it gives the company “the necessary clarity to move forward from events that took place many years ago.”Harry said it was a “great day for truth as well as accountability,” and his efforts to maintain a “free and honest press” were worthwhile. He thanked his team for helping him in “dismantling the sworn testimony” of MGN. “I've been told that slaying dragons will get you burned,” the prince said. “But in light of today's victory and the importance of doing what is needed for a free and honest press — it's a worthwhile price to pay.”Morgan denied her knew off the hacking and launched a vitriolic attack against Harry,“I never hacked a phone,” Morgan said at a press scrum outside his house following the ruling. “I wouldn't even know how. I never told anybody to hack a phone.” The host said he didn't have a “single conversation with any of the MGN lawyers throughout the entire legal process,” and would have been glad to “provide a statement,” had he been asked. “Prince Harry's outrage about the media intrusion into the private lives of the Royal Family is only matched by his own ruthless, greedy and hypocritical enthusiasm for doing it himself,” he said. “He demands accountability for the press, but refuses to accept any for himself, for smearing the royal family, his own family, as a bunch of callous racists without producing a shred of proof to support those disgraceful claims.”“He wouldn't know the truth if it slapped him around his California-tanned face.”
