Prince Harry has launched a fierce attack on the “vile” press, blaming tabloids for destroying his adolescence and later relationships, as he gave evidence for almost five hours in his lawsuit against a tabloid publisher.
As he became the first senior royal to appear in a witness box in Britain in more than a century, Harry also said the thought of people unlawfully intruding into the private life of his late mother, Princess Diana, made him “feel physically sick”.
“I’ve always heard people refer to my mother as paranoid but she wasn’t. She was fearful of what was actually happening to her and now I know that I was the same,” Harry said in his witness statement.
The prince, the fifth-in-line to the throne, and 100 others are suing Mirror Group Newspapers – publisher of the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People – at the High Court in London over allegations of widespread unlawful information gathering between 1991 and 2011.
In his 50-page written witness statement and a day of cross-examination from MGN’s lawyer Andrew Green, the King’s younger son said he had been targeted since 1996, when he was a schoolboy.
Harry said the press would try to destroy his relationships with girlfriends, blaming them for his break-up with Chelsy Davy, for causing his circle of friends to shrink and for bouts of depression and paranoia.
He said he had been labelled a “playboy prince”, a “thicko”, a “failure” and a “drop out”.
“Looking back on it now, such behaviour on their part is utterly vile,” he wrote, saying the tabloids had incited “hatred and harassment” into his and his wife Meghan Markle’s private lives.
In another section he said: “How much more blood will stain their typing fingers before someone can put a stop to this madness?”
Asked to whom he was referring, he said: “Some of the editors and journalists that are responsible for causing a lot of pain, upset and in some cases – perhaps inadvertently – death.”
Prince Harry’s gap year in Australia in 2003 also came under scrutiny over his “awful” experiences of allegedly being followed by the tabloids and a private investigator.
In a witness statement, the prince told of a time he was photographed on a beach in Noosa, and another article that described his moves while working as a jackaroo on a Queensland station.
“I was only in Australia with a couple of UK bodyguards, so this is the kind of thing I would have moaned about over the phone and in voicemails, ” read the witness statement.
Mr Green began his questioning on Tuesday (local time) respectfully, personally apologising to Harry on MGN’s behalf for one instance in which the media company admitted unlawful information gathering, saying “it should never have happened and it will not happen again”.
Mr Green then forensically, and with increasing hostility, quizzed the prince about 33 newspaper articles, whose details Harry claims were obtained unlawfully.
Looking relaxed but serious, and speaking softly but firmly, the Duke of Sussex said thousands if not millions of stories had been written about him, as Mr Green pressed him on whether he had read the MGN articles in question at the time they were published.
Mr Green intimated that the distress the duke had suffered was caused by press coverage in general, not the specific MGN stories, and suggested they were based on details already in the public domain.
Several times, Mr Green described Harry’s allegations as “total speculation”.
Asked about the source of information for articles at the centre of his lawsuit, the prince repeatedly said that question should be asked of the journalist who wrote them, saying they appeared suspicious.
Quizzed about one article, Harry said it was “as distressing looking at it now” as it was when it was published in 2004.
He will be back on Wednesday to give more evidence.
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Earlier, Harry had briefly smiled as he arrived at court, passing a phalanx of photographers and camera crews.
Outside the courtroom, people queued to gain access to one of the dozen or so seats allocated to the public.
When the duke returned to the room after a short break in his evidence, he was greeted with cries of “Harry, we love you” from one small group waiting outside.
MGN, now owned by Reach, has previously admitted its titles were involved in phone-hacking, settling more than 600 claims. But Mr Green has said there was no evidence that Harry had ever been a victim.
He argued that some of the personal information had come from, or with the consent of, senior Buckingham Palace aides.
Harry, who has accused his family, or royal aides, of colluding with the tabloids, replied: “From certain individuals, yes.”
-with AAP
