Prince Harry is expected to be back for his second day in court on Wednesday, but several experts are already wondering what his latest legal battle will mean for his relationship with the royal family.
On Tuesday, the Duke of Sussex stepped into a U.K. courtroom witness box to hold Britain’s tabloid press accountable for its “destructive” role throughout his life. However, the 38-year-old found himself being held to account by a newspaper’s lawyer for how he could blame his anguish on articles he couldn’t remember reading.
The youngest son of King Charles III accuses the publisher of the Daily Mirror of using unlawful techniques on an “industrial scale” to score front-page scoops on his life. He is the first senior member of the royal family to testify in over a century. During the trial, the prince needs to convince the judge, Timothy Fancourt, that the publisher indeed hacked his voicemails, and used other unlawful means to gather private information.
“Harry’s decision to take the stand is brave – that cannot be denied,” Christopher Andersen, author of “The King,” told Fox News Digital. “But is it wise?”
Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, leaves the courtroom Tuesday after testifying at the hearing of a lawsuit against the Daily Mirror newspaper on charges of wiretapping and illegally collecting private information. (Rasid Necati Aslim /Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
“The royal family has always played the long game when it comes to the press,” he shared. “The monarchy is a brand and needs to maintain a working relationship with Britain’s tabloids. There is simply no way around it. This is simply a fact of life. The king knows, as his mother Queen Elizabeth II knew before him, that he may sit on the throne now but the press reigns forever.”
“If Harry prevails in this case, it will be a pyrrhic victory at best,” Andersen shared. “Harry has cast himself in the role of David battling Goliath, but I don’t envision this giant going down quite so easily.”
British royal expert Hilary Forwich told Fox News Digital that Harry’s ongoing legal battles are a far cry from the “never complain, never explain” motto that the British royal family has stood by. This case, she said, will only further scrutinize details of his private life, putting them on public display once more.
“This tawdry case goes against the grain of everything royal,” Fordwich claimed. “Prince Harry continues to both complain and wants everyone else to explain. This is a lose-lose situation for him. Barristers in England are the equivalent of litigation attorneys in America. They are trained in cross-examination and brilliant interrogation tactics.”
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Prince Harry is one of several claimants in a lawsuit against Mirror Group Newspapers related to allegations of unlawful information gathering in previous decades. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)
“The likelihood that he contradicts himself is highly likely,” Fordwich warned. “Because according to him in his own words, in his recent tell-all author biography, he described himself as a ‘glacial learner.’ That is in stark contrast to a brilliantly schooled barrister.”
On Tuesday, Harry told Mirror Group Newspapers attorney Andrew Green that he had “experienced hostility from the press since I was born.” The prince accused the tabloids of playing “a destructive role in my growing up.”
Harry was forced almost immediately to acknowledge that he wasn’t sure he could recall the 33 specific articles he was complaining about from the thousands he said had been written about him.
“Is it realistic, when you have been the subject of so much press intrusion… both domestic and international, to attribute specific distress to a particular article from 20 years ago, which you may not have seen at the time?” Green asked.
Prince Harry has taken legal action against Mirror Group Newspapers over alleged unlawful information gathering, including phone hacking. (Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
“It isn’t a specific article, it is all of the articles,” Harry replied. “Every single article has caused me distress.”
The case dates from 1996 to 2011. Harry said the articles caused him to become depressed and paranoid, and distrustful of friends who he feared were feeding information to the media. His circle of friends shrank, relationships fell apart, and he felt constantly in the glare of the journalists who were shaping the narrative of his life.
“I genuinely feel that in every relationship that I’ve ever had – be that with friends, girlfriends, with family or with the army – there’s always been a third party involved, namely the tabloid press,” Harry admitted in a written witness statement.
Green asked Harry to identify what evidence he had of phone hacking in specific articles. However, Harry repeatedly said he’d have to ask that question of the journalist who wrote it. He continually insisted that the manner in which information had been obtained was highly or incredibly suspicious.
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Prince Harry has long blamed the paparazzi for causing the car crash that killed his mother, Princess Diana, in 1997. (Terry Fincher/Princess Diana Archive/Getty Images)
Harry said some of the journalists had been known for hacking or that there were invoices to third parties, including private investigators known for snooping, around the time of the articles.
“Prince Harry is drawing attention to his insecurities,” Kinsey Schofield, host of the “To Di For Daily,” told Fox News Digital. She pointed out that U.K. outlets “now, unfortunately, know his Achilles heel.”
“His barrister is trying to claim that every story written about Harry over [a certain] amount of time was secured under nefarious circumstances,” she noted. Schofield said so far, “little to no evidence” has been provided to support those claims.
“Yes, Harry has been unfairly treated in the past… violated… but similar to the ‘two-hour car chase’ that the NYC mayor and NYPD recently discredited… Harry’s reactions and descriptions are exaggerated to the point of hysteria, and it causes people not to take him seriously,” she claimed.
Meghan Markle spoke behind the podium and talked of service prior to the reported car chase in New York City. The incident in question occurred in May of this year. (Kevin Mazur/Astrid Stawiarz)
“It also feels like this is a man trapped in the past that simply can’t let things go,” Schofield added.
At one point, Green asked Harry how reporters could have hacked his phone for an article about his 12th birthday, a time when he admitted he didn’t have a cellphone. Harry suggested that reporters may have possibly hacked his late mother’s phone.
“That’s just speculation you’ve come up with now,” Green suggested.
The attorney then pointed out that a reference in the same article to him taking his parents’ divorce badly was obvious.
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Court artist sketch by Elizabeth Cook of the Duke of Sussex, with his counsel David Sherborne, giving evidence during the phone hacking trial against Mirror Group Newspapers. (Elizabeth Cook/PA via Alamy)
“Like most children, I think, yes,” Harry said.
But the prince said it was not legitimate to report such information and “the methods in which it was obtained seem incredibly suspicious.”
Green then pointed out that his mother previously made public comments to reporters about the difficulties her children faced after the divorce.
Harry has previously detailed his fury against the British press in his memoir “Spare,” which was published in January. The royal has made it his mission of holding the U.K. media to account for what he sees as their hounding of him and his family.
Meghan Markle became the Duchess of Sussex when she married the British prince in 2018. They stepped back as senior royals in 2020. (Ben Stansall/AFP)
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. Sherborne described how stories about Harry, in particular, were big sellers for the newspapers, and around 2,500 articles covered all facets of his life.
“Nothing was sacrosanct or out of bounds,” Sherborne insisted.
Mirror Group has paid more than 100 million pounds ($125 million) to settle hundreds of unlawful information-gathering claims and printed an apology to phone hacking victims in 2015. However, the newspaper denies or hasn’t admitted any of Harry’s claims. On Monday, Green said there was “simply no evidence capable of supporting the finding that the Duke of Sussex was hacked, let alone on a habitual basis.”
The case against Mirror Group is the first of the prince’s several lawsuits against the media to go to trial. It is one of three publishers he alleged unlawfully snooped on him for scoops on the royal family.
Harry has long blamed the paparazzi for causing the car crash that killed his mother, Princess Diana, in 1997. Harry also said harassment and intrusion by the U.K. press, including allegedly racist articles, led him and his wife to flee the country.
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The Duke and Duchess of Sussex reside in California with their two young children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet. (Getty Images)
Meghan Markle, a former American actress, became the Duchess of Sussex when she married the British prince in 2018. They stepped down as senior members of the royal family in 2020. They now reside in California with their two young children.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
