I get the feeling that many Sussex fans have sort of tapped out of paying close attention to the ins and outs of Prince Harry’s lawsuits against the British tabloids. I also get lost in some of the details of the cases, especially Harry’s case against News Group Newspapers (NGN). This is one of Harry’s most long-gestating cases, and that’s mostly because NGN has the resources to throw the kitchen sink at Harry and his legal team. As it turns out, Harry has not wilted – he threw the kitchen sink right back at NGN, and now the whole thing heads to trial on the 20th. Clive Irving wrote a fascinating piece in Vanity Fair about the upcoming trial, the first of its kind against NGN. NGN has successfully settled with all of their victims before any of the hundreds of cases made it to trial. There’s been a real failure to report what kind of settlement offers NGN has made to Harry, which I find interesting. Harry hasn’t leaked anything, and NGN doesn’t want to look weak, like they’re scared of what the trial might reveal so they want to throw millions at the problem. Some highlights from Irving’s “How Prince Harry Planted a Ticking Time Bomb Under the Murdoch Empire.”
NGN’s counsel Anthony Hudson has been exasperated about Harry’s refusal to settle: There had long been doubt about whether Harry would hold out for a trial rather than settle. As Hudson himself explained to the court: “More than 1,300 claims have been settled. NGN has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to settle claims brought against it and more than properly compensated claimants.” He seemed to be arguing that it was unreasonable of Harry to actually do what he always said he intended to do: hold the Murdoch empire publicly accountable for one of the most squalid episodes in the history of British journalism, in which hacking and so-called “blagging”—the obtaining of information through deceptive means—were allegedly widely used to violate the privacy of public figures and in attempts of kompromat against politicians considered hostile to the Murdoch interests.
Harry’s case doesn’t actually involve phone hacking: However, as it has turned out, Harry’s case does not involve phone hacking. He cites 30 articles and 20 incidents, dating between 1998 and 2011, in which he claims that private investigators violated his privacy. Together this involves 16 PIs and 23 journalists. The case does include allegations of blagging, specifically in stories alleging habitual drug use by Harry that his lawyer, David Sherborne, told the judge in December were untrue, even though, according to Sherborne, Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of the Murdoch papers at the time, had assured Buckingham Palace that they were supported by evidence.
Harry’s lawyers will spend the first weeks of the trial on “generic issues.” Instead, [the first weeks of the trial] will be devoted to what is referred to in a bland technical term as “generic issues.” This is where the real reputational threat to the Murdoch empire lies—like a ticking bomb. Sherborne has all along insisted that the trial should begin, not narrowly with the specific cases, but by drawing on evidence gathered in years of discovery, revealing that the Murdoch tabloid newsrooms allegedly deployed hacking, blagging, and private investigators at such a scale that it became institutionalized and that, Sherborne has argued, this could never have happened without the knowledge and direction of senior Murdoch executives. That charge flows directly into another: that once the scandal was exposed, there was an alleged conspiracy to destroy or conceal evidence describing how extensive it was and—critically—to conceal how far up the executive tree the knowledge of it went. In classic forensic terms: Who knew what and when did they know it?
NGN is freaking out: This is the last thing that Murdoch and his top executives want to happen. Hudson has made repeated objections to these generic issues being aired at all, claiming that they are irrelevant to the specific claimant cases of Harry and Watson, and arguing that Sherborne was trying to turn the trial “into something akin to a public inquiry.” Then, in December, when requesting the delay, he complained that there were 200,000 pages of documents for him to digest, many of them witness statements. [The judge] Fancourt, in response, turned that problem back on Hudson and his team: “The defendant did a lot of work but it was rather ill directed in producing an unwieldy and far too detailed schedule.”
I’m reminded of my concerns during Harry’s trial against the Daily Mirror, and how it often felt like the court was doing too much to protect the Mirror rather than the victims of the Mirror’s unlawful actions. The Mirror trial turned out well for Harry though – he won the first part of his case and settled the rest. It feels like this judge, Fancourt, is doing too much to limit Harry and Sherborne’s extensive claims about NGN’s operations, but Clive Irving clearly feels like NGN is panicked about what could be revealed, even with a more limited scope. Once the trial gets going, I wonder if NGN will make another settlement offer to Harry to simply stop the bleeding.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.
