Prince Harry’s Legal Filing Against Murdoch’s News Group For Mobile Phone Hacking

As before any hurricane, this is the interregnum that passes for calm slightly out in front of the storm of Charles III’s coronation in London on May 6. The more or less hysterical runup will begin in a very short week in and around town, attended by the portentous practice drum rolls and tattoos of the military units that will accompany the Imperial State Coach on its stately sashay down the Mall to Westminster Abbey. The Royal Horse Guards’ tack and the soldiers’ brass have been polished to a high sheen. Charles III has been seventy-four years in preparation. It’s going to be a fine show.

Except: There’s a very different, less programmed, somewhat more tumultuous show working itself out among and around the principal actors who will be going through the official motions of setting the Imperial State Crown of Edward’s on Charles’ head, and that is the re-examination of the royal family’s history in, and with, the British press. On cue, then, Prince Harry has obliged by doggedly pursuing his three concurrrent-but-separately-running court proceedings against, in no particular order, the Murdoch family’s News Corp., for phone hacking alleged to have occurred during Murdoch executive Rebekah Brooks’ tenure as editor of the Sun in the mid-Aughts; Associated Newspapers (publishers of the Daily Mail, which in 2020 lost its defense of an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit from Meghan Markle); and the Mirror Group, publishers of the tabloid The Mirror.

It’s in this first proceeding, against News Group Newspapers (NGN), that Harry’s legal team generated headlines on 25 April in a court filing that referred, first, to what the lawyers describe as a ‘large’ and heretofore unknown settlement between the Murdoch group and the new Prince of Wales, Prince William. As the British would drily put it: Harry’s team’s filing could have been better timed.

That a highly-placed News Group Newspapers editor, Andy Coulsen — then editor of the since-shuttered News of The World — and its royal-beat reporter, the oh-so-aptly-named Clive Goodman, along with five others, including the private detective Glenn Mulcaire — engaged in criminal behavior in accessing (by police estimate) hundreds of celebrities’ mobile phones is not news. Both stalwart Murdoch newsmen were convicted in criminal court in 2014 of conspiracy to hack and did jail time. Before he was trundled off to serve his sentence, Coulsen was at the time a spokesman for the then Prime Minister David Cameron. His presence in the inner Cameron court didn’t go down well at the time.

Nevertheless, along with Hugh Grant, Sienna Miller, Jude Law, and other greater and lesser lights of the British professional and social swirl, the current heir to the throne, William, was hacked some 35 times by Goodman. Harry’s phone is reported to have been hacked nine times. Kate Middleton was considered far jucier news: She was hacked a reported 135 times — arguably, also, as a source for tracking what would be euphemistically termed ‘family movements’ — in intelligence terms, the mom’s phone would be considered the go-to source.

In all, it’s estimated that News Corp. paid out some $1.24 billion in settlements of the literally dozens of high profile lawsuits, most of which were settled after extensive investigations by the police and the Guardian between 2005-2012. So, it was with a raised eyebrow or two that the fine print of Harry’s recent filing was parsed, as it revealed that William’s (substantial, but un-revealed) settlement with the Murdoch group in 2020 was part of a larger, also-unrevealed overarching ‘agreement’ between the Murdoch papers and the royal family, instantly and vehemently denied by Buckingham and Kensington palaces and by News Corp. more or less minutes after it became public knowledge yesterday in London.

In their filing, Harry’s lawyers gave no specific time for this alleged deal to have been cut (or verbally agreed to), but citing it was important for them because Harry’s current suit, alleging that Murdoch operatives at the Sun also engaged in phone hacking of him, is being defended with the argument that the claim is outdated, that Harry had time to bring the suit before the statute of limitations on it expired, and that he should have done so. In its early defense of itself back in the Aughts, the News Corp initially maintained that Goodman was “rogue” and that the News of the World was relatively isolated in the practice of hacking, but the endemic scale of the enterprise, along with the arrest and trial of Ms. Brooks, who was acquitted, and of her lover Mr. Coulson, who was convicted, and the subsequent size and breadth of the settlements put that ‘isolated-case’ defense to an extreme test. Put a different way, it has long been assumed by the victims and their attorneys that the practice of hacking did not stop with the News of the World or its hapless top editor Coulson.

So, is Harry right? We don’t know the answer to that yet. We do know that one last headache his father needs in the week before the week of his coronation is the additional, strange floated notion that the palaces themselves — under the Queen but well within what we might call the Charles ‘regency’ in the latter part of the Queen’s life — cut a deal with Rupert Murdoch.