Prince Harry’s British lawyer David Sherborne was in court again this week for yet another hearing in Harry’s case against NGN, News Group Newspapers, aka Rupert Murdoch’s British media arm. Harry is part of a class-action lawsuit against NGN for phone hacking and other criminal activities. This has already dragged on for years. This week’s hearing was about NGN’s demands that HARRY provide emails, texts and WhatsApp messages from over a decade ago to the court. Obviously, a lot of that stuff is just… gone. Old email accounts, old phones, old servers, etc. Would you be able to provide text messages from eleven years ago in court? Very few of us could. But my larger question is: why would the plaintiff have to provide reams of communications with palace senior staff to the court when he’s suing a newspaper for hacking HIM? Well, that hasn’t stopped the British media from running stories about Harry “deliberately destroying” these records. GMAFB.
The Duke of Sussex “deliberately destroyed” potential evidence relating to his High Court phone hacking claim against the publisher of The Sun, it has been claimed. News Group Newspapers (NGN) is seeking the release of emails, as well as text messages and WhatsApp messages, sent and received by the Duke, and material held on two encrypted hard drives. The publisher is also demanding to see records of communication between the Duke and Sir Clive Alderton, the King’s private secretary, as well as Sir Michael Stevens, the Keeper of the Privy Purse and treasurer to the King. It wants access to the many texts sent between the Duke and JR Moehringer, the author who ghostwrote his memoir, Spare.
David Sherborne, for the Duke, said the pair communicated via Signal and their chat history was wiped before the book was published in January last year. He said three Hotmail addresses used by Prince Harry prior to 2014 – spikewales@hotmail.com; spikewells@hotmail.com and bazasales69@hotmail.com – were no longer accessible.
However, the Duke’s legal team has searched other email accounts to which he has access – h@sjpkp.com and ha@sjpkp.com, which span a period from January 2014 until April this year, for three keywords, and is now searching them for the 55 search terms sought by NGN.
Mr Sherborne described NGN’s disclosure application as a “fishing expedition”. The Royal family’s solicitors, Harbottle and Lewis, have insisted they hold no documents that are “in the claimant’s control”.
Anthony Hudson KC, for NGN, accused the Duke of “obfuscating” and said that if he wanted access to documents from his former solicitors, or from the Royal household, he would be given them. He accused the Duke of “trying to create an obstacle course” to prevent the publisher obtaining potential evidence and said his legal team had been dragged “kicking and screaming” to search a cache of 36,000 potentially relevant emails.
“There ought to be proper evidence about this,” he told the court. “Those messages are clearly within his control, even if they have been deleted. That’s why we say the search for texts and WhatsApps is important. It is, I’m afraid we say, another example of the obfuscation in relation to the claimant’s case. We say it’s shocking and extraordinary that the claimant has deliberately destroyed…”
Mr Justice Fancourt interrupted the barrister to say: “Well we don’t know what has happened. It’s not at all clear.”
The back-and-forth between Sherborne and NGN’s lawyers gets even weirder beyond this, but I’m not going to excerpt the whole sorry state of it. Basically, NGN thinks that they can run to court and call Harry names and accuse him of all kinds of destruction-of-evidence when NGN has a long history of doing exactly that, destroying evidence. Every accusation is a confession when it comes to the Windsors and when it comes to the British media. It absolutely feels like a fishing expedition on NGN’s part, and even more than that, they’re fishing for content to run in real time. They’d love nothing more than for Harry to turn over years of communications with palace senior staff which NGN lawyers will then turn over to The Sun so they can create even more content.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.