Harry, the Duke of Sussex, accuses newspaper of using unlawful methods to get stories which left him in a downward spiral.
Prince Harry entered a courtroom witness box on Tuesday, swearing to tell the truth in testimony against a tabloid publisher he accuses of phone hacking and other unlawful snooping.
Harry held a Bible in one hand as he was sworn in at the High Court in London, where he is suing the publisher of the Daily Mirror.
Harry accuses the publisher of using unlawful techniques on an “industrial scale” to get scoops. He faces hours of cross-examination by a lawyer for the defendant, Mirror Group Newspapers, which is contesting the claims.
Sitting in the witness box and dressed in a dark suit and tie, Harry told Mirror Group attorney Andrew Green he had “experienced hostility from the press since I was born.” The prince accused the tabloids of playing “a destructive role in my growing-up.”
The 38-year-old son of King Charles III is the first senior British royal since the 19th century to face questioning in a court. An ancestor, the future King Edward VII, appeared as a witness in a trial over a gambling scandal in 1891.
Setting out the prince’s case in court, his lawyer, David Sherborne, said that from Harry’s childhood, British newspapers used hacking and subterfuge to mine snippets of information that could be turned into front-page scoops.
He said stories about Harry were big sellers for the newspapers, and some 2,500 articles had covered all facets of his life during the time period of the case — 1996 to 2011 — from injuries at school to experimenting with marijuana and cocaine, to ups and downs with girlfriends.
“Nothing was sacrosanct or out of bounds” for the tabloids, the lawyer said.
In a written witness statement, Harry said he felt “as though the tabloid press thought that they owned me absolutely.”
“I genuinely feel that in every relationship that I’ve ever had – be that with friends, girlfriends, with family or with the army, there’s always been a third party involved, namely the tabloid press,” he said.
Hacking — the practice of guessing or using default security codes to listen to celebrities’ cellphone voice messages — was widespread at British tabloids in the early years of this century.
Mirror Group has paid more than £100 million (€116 million) to settle hundreds of unlawful information-gathering claims, and printed an apology to phone hacking victims in 2015. But the newspaper denies or has not admitted any of Harry’s claims, which relate to 33 published articles.
Defence lawyer Green said Monday there was “simply no evidence capable of supporting the finding that the Duke of Sussex was hacked, let alone on a habitual basis.”
Source: Euro News
