Prince Harry points to his legal battles with British tabloids as a “central piece” that destroyed his relationship with his family.
The 39-year-old Duke of Sussex shared the notion as part of an ITV documentary dubbed Tabloids On Trial, which is slated to air Thursday in the UK. The documentary is centered around Harry’s legal fight against Mirror Group Newspapers. Harry settled his hacking case against Mirror Group Newspapers back in February.
“That’s certainly a central piece to it,” Harry explains (via Variety) in the doc about his determination to fight the tabloids in court leading to a family rift. “But, you know, that’s a hard question to answer because anything I say about my family results in a torrent of abuse from the press… I’ve made it very clear that this is something that needs to be done. It would be nice if we, you know, did it as a family. I believe that, again, from a service standpoint and when you are in a public role, that these are the things that we should be doing for the greater good. But, you know, I’m doing this for my reasons.”
He added, “I think everything that’s played out has shown people what the truth of the matter is. For me, the mission continues, but it has, it has, yes. It’s caused, yeah, as you say, part of a rift.”
Harry, along with his wife, Meghan Markle, stepped away from their royal duties in 2020. More than four years later, that rift is alive and well, particularly when it comes to Harry’s relationship, or lack thereof, with his brother, Prince William, whom royal expert Katie Nicholl said in October 2022 that he hasn’t been able to forgive Harry.
While Harry has settled his phone hacking case with Mirror Group Newspapers (a settlement that included MGN forking over $505,000), his fight is far from over. Harry and other claimants are set to go to trial with News Group Newspapers, the publisher of The Sun, in January 2025 over claims of unlawful information gathering. In that case, Harry has come under fire after a lawyer for The Sun accused him of “deliberately” destroying messages he exchanged with the ghostwriter of his 2023 memoir, Spare.
Elsewhere in the documentary, Harry maintains that his late mother, Princess Diana, was “probably one of the first people to be hacked.”
“And yet still today, the press, the tabloid press very much enjoy painting her as being paranoid,” said Harry, whose family’s ongoing fight for privacy dates decades upon decades. “But she wasn’t paranoid, she was absolutely right of what was happening to her. And she’s not around to find out the truth.”
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