The more I cover Prince Harry’s legal actions against the British media, the more mind-bending I find the British media’s operations and the British legal system. It’s not a comparison to the American legal system, which is also flawed and crazy in its own unique way. But the legal arguments being made by various British press outlets to defend themselves against Harry’s lawsuits are absolutely crazy. Last week, the lawyers for News Group Newspapers got a hearing on the issue of Prince Harry’s incomplete records. Again, Harry is the plaintiff. He’s suing NGN for hacking into his private communications, for illegal surveillance and blagging. NGN wants Harry to provide them with extensive documentation of HIS communications to his ghostwriter JR Moehringer. And what’s worse is that NGN just won this motion and the judge has told Harry to provide the court with those messages.
The Duke of Sussex has been ordered to explain why messages with his ghostwriter were destroyed after the publication of his memoir Spare when they could be relevant to his legal battle with the publishers of the Sun. Prince Harry was also told to attempt to retrieve the messages from the messaging service Signal, and his lawyers ordered to search through his other texts, WhatsApp messages and emails from 2005 to January 2023, when his bestselling autobiography was published, for relevant documents.
Anthony Hudson KC, for News Group Newspapers (NGN), accused the duke of “obfuscation” and creating an “obstacle course” during its efforts to find relevant material for the litigation over the prince’s allegations of unlawful information gathering. Harry had to be forced “kicking and screaming” to carry out searches of his communications, Hudson told the high court judge Mr Justice Fancourt on Thursday.
At the one-day hearing, NGN argued the Signal messages between 2020 and 2023 were important because Spare contained extensive references to the duke’s knowledge and suspicion of unlawful information gathering before 2013, the applicable date in the case. Any claim for damages must be lodged within six years, with Harry having launched his legal action in 2019. If he believed he had a potential claim against NGN before 2013, then the case could be dismissed on the grounds it was filed too late.
In his oral ruling, the judge described “troubling evidence” that a “large number of potentially relevant documents, confidential messages between the claimant and his ghostwriter [JR Moehringer] of Spare, as well as all the drafts of Spare, were destroyed sometime between 2021 and 2023, well after this claim was under way”.
It was not clear “what exactly happened and needs to be made so by a witness statement by the claimant himself explaining what happened to the Signal messages between him and his ghostwriter and whether any attempts have been made to seek to retrieve them”, Fancourt added. “It seems to me inherently likely that in the course of discussing at length the material for the duke’s autobiography, matters would have been said that related to the parts of Spare in which unlawful information gathering in relation to newspapers is discussed.”
He said Moehringer had written in a New Yorker magazine article that he and Harry “were texting around the clock”. The judge ordered the duke’s lawyers to search texts, WhatsApps and Signal messages as well as Harry’s laptop for relevant documents from 2005 to the end of January 2023, which was the date of publication of Spare, using 47 keywords. He said attempts should be made to retrieve the Signal messages that were believed to have been deleted.
The judge also expressed “real concern” that the majority of searches for relevant documents had been conducted by “the duke himself in California”, rather than by his solicitors. He said that apart from the articles Harry complained about, and documents relating to his responding to a summary judgment application the duke had “only disclosed five documents”, adding: “That is rather remarkable and gives me cause for concern about the disclosure exercise.”
The judge’s ruling is bonkers, all things considered. NGN’s argument is: Harry deleted evidence of his knowledge of our criminal hacking pre-2013, and he must provide the court with ALL of his messages to his ghostwriter proving that he knew we were hacking him for years! The Guardian also covers David Sherborne’s rebuttal to NGN’s lawyers and now the judge. Sherborne basically said that Harry’s knowledge of hacking in 2021 doesn’t mean he had that same knowledge in 2013. Sherborne also accused NGN of trying to grab/create negative headlines about Harry “erasing evidence,” as if Harry was the guilty party in this situation. This whole thing is so utterly absurd, as Sherborne points out that this is all projection on NGN’s part, given their years-long cover-up and their own deletion of millions of emails.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.