Prince Harry’s Wins £140,000 In Damages After Court Rules His Phone Was Hacked By Tabloid

Prince Harry won his phone hacking case against the Daily Mirror’s publisher on Friday, receiving more than 140,000 pounds ($180,000) in the first of numerous claims against British tabloids to go to trial, news agency AP reported. Phone hacking was “widespread and habitual” at Mirror Group Newspapers for many years, according to High Court Justice Timothy Fancourt, and private investigators “were an integral part of the system” to obtain information illegally. He said that officials at the newspapers were aware of the practice but chose to conceal it.

Fancourt stated that he awarded the Duke of Sussex damages for 15 of the 33 newspaper pieces at trial that were the consequence of illegal information collecting and resulted in the misuse of Harry’s private information.

The court further added damages for the duke’s anguish and an additional sum for aggravated damages to “reflect the particular hurt and sense of outrage” over the fact that two directors at Trinity Mirror were aware of the conduct but did nothing to stop it.

“Instead of doing so, they turned a blind eye to what was going on and positively concealed it,” Fancourt was quoted by AP in its report. “Had the illegal conduct been stopped, the misuse of the duke’s private information would have ended much sooner,” he further stated. 

Harry, King Charles III’s younger son, had sought 440,000 pounds ($560,000) as part of a battle against the British media that defied his family’s historical aversion to litigation and made him the first senior member of the royal family to testify in court in more than a century.

His testimony in the witness box over two days in June made a spectacle out of charges that Mirror Group Newspapers had engaged journalists who eavesdropped on voicemails and paid private investigators to learn about him and other family members through deceptive and illegal means.

“I believe that phone hacking was at an industrial scale across at least three of the papers at the time,” Harry asserted in the court. “That is beyond any doubt,” he further said. 

The court stated that Harry had a propensity in his evidence “to assume that everything published was the product of voicemail interception,” which was not the case. He asserted that the Mirror Group was “not responsible for all of the unlawful activity directed at the Duke.”