Prince Harry Breaks Silence After Losing U.K. Tabloid Case

Prince Harry is speaking out after he lost his lawsuit against the U.K. tabloids, along with six other claimants.

Harry and other high-profile figures, including Sir Elton John and Elizabeth Hurley, were suing Associated Newspapers for alleged unlawful information gathering like phone hacking from 1993-2011.

High Court Judge Mr. Justice Nicklin rejected the claims. In a judgment obtained by the BBC, the judge stated, "The Court rejected the attempt to prove the claims by broad inference where there remained a legitimate and realistic possible lawful source pathway, or where the article-specific evidence did not prove that the relevant information must have been obtained unlawfully.”

On Tuesday, after speaking onstage at Chatham House about the 2027 Invictus Games, Harry broke his silence in a joint statement with claimant Baroness Doreen Lawrence.

In the joint statement, obtained by People magazine, they said, “We came to Court seeking justice and accountability. But we have received neither. This judgment represents a complete reversal of the position which previous Judges have taken in relation to the hacking claims successfully brought against both News Group Newspapers and Mirror Group Newspapers (who were represented by, at the time, the Judge who made this decision). Generic findings about various private investigators that were held by the Courts in these parallel claims to have carried out unlawful activity at the very same time in relation to similar stories and well-known individuals have been wholly ignored. The fact that this Court has chosen to dismiss them represents an inconsistency which is hard to understand or reconcile with common sense, or the evidence heard in the courtroom itself.”

The statement continued, “It is a complete and obvious whitewash, but sadly not altogether unexpected. However, the lengths to which the Court has gone to exonerate The Mail is as shocking as it is totally unwarranted.

“When the Court says there is not sufficient evidence of wrongdoing, despite the documents showing otherwise, then one does wonder how justice was ever going to be achieved,” the statement went on. "One need not look past when a private investigator the Mail used actually admitted on tape to having unlawfully blagged Baroness Lawrence, or when a journalist recorded the name of the private investigators she used to find out about highly sensitive medical information (that even The Mail was too worried to publish).”

Seeming to reference Harry’s ex, Chelsy Davy, the statement went on, “Or when another private investigator emailed one of the journalists with the actual British Airways seat number and ticketing details for a young girl simply visiting her boyfriend in return for payment."

They said, “It feels here like one rule for the newspapers and another for the claimants. While the Claimants presented evidence, Mail journalists simply gave denials, and the Court chose uncritically to believe them, even in the face of inconsistencies, contradictions and blatant untruths that were obvious to neutral observers in Court when compared to the documents. We presented to the Court evidence which we believed was compelling at the time and remains so now. We would like to thank our legal team for all their hard work and all the witnesses who were brave enough to come forward in the pursuit of justice.”

After news broke that the claimants had lost the case, Associated Newspapers released a statement to the BBC calling the ruling an “overwhelming victory,” adding their journalists have been “exonerated.”