Prince Harry blames his fight with tabloid press for family breakdown
The Duke of Sussex has said that his legal crusade against the tabloid press was central to the breakdown of his relationship with his family.
Prince Harry, 39, told an ITV documentary that “it would be nice” if the Royal family had joined forces to take on the media together.
He said: “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… yes. It’s caused… part of a rift.”
Prince Harry and Meghan’s decision to step back from public duties and move abroad, accompanied by dramatic rhetoric and allegations of racism, as well as the raft of private revelations disclosed in the Duke’s memoir and in various television interviews, are considered central to family tensions.
However, the Duke believes that his continuing legal fight against the press, which has involved several High Court claims, some of which are active, is largely to blame.
Asked whether his determination to fight the tabloids had destroyed the relationship with his family, he told the documentary, Tabloids on Trial: “Yeah, that’s certainly a central piece to it.
“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.”
He added: “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.”
In March 2023, the Duke revealed that his brother, the Prince of Wales, had settled a phone hacking claim for a “very large sum” against News Group Newspapers (NGN), the publisher of The Sun, three years earlier.
However, his allegations about a “secret agreement” between Buckingham Palace and Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper group were denied by all sides and rejected as “implausible” by a judge.
The Duke also suggests in the documentary that his legal battles had demonstrated that his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, was not “paranoid” as many have suggested but was “absolutely right” to fear what was going on around her.
Asked whether phone hacking had made him paranoid, he said: “I think paranoia is a very interesting word because yes, then it could be paranoia, but then when you’re vindicated it proves that you weren’t being paranoid. You know, same with my mother.
“There is evidence to suggest that she was being hacked in the mid-1990s, 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.
“But she wasn’t paranoid, she was absolutely right of what was happening to her. And she’s not around today to find out the truth.”
The Duke has alleged in court that NGN accessed messages on his late mother’s pager.
Allegations from 1994 rejected
However, his attempt to expand the parameters of his case to take in the allegations, dating back to 1994, was rejected by the judge.
The ITV documentary, which will be broadcast on Thursday night, comes as the Duke continues to pursue high-profile claims against the Associated Newspapers Limited, publisher of the Daily Mail, and NGN.
It is his first interview since his claim against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) concluded in December 2023, when he was awarded £140,600 in compensation after 15 of 33 articles were found to have been the product of phone hacking or unlawful information gathering.
Prince Harry called the judge’s ruling a “monumental victory”.
He said: “To go in there and come out and have the judge rule in our favour was obviously huge. But for him to go as far as he did with regard to, you know, this wasn’t just the individual people.
“This went right up to the top...this was lawyers, this was high executives. And to be able to achieve that in a trial, that’s a monumental victory.”
He hailed himself a “dragon slayer” and said it justified his “slow and painful” fight for justice.
He later accepted “substantial” damages to end his four-year legal battle with MGN rather than pursue a second phone hacking trial.
In a more recent development, it was alleged by NGN in court that the Duke had “deliberately destroyed” potential evidence relating to his claim against the publisher, prompting the judge to order him to explain himself.
Mr Justice Fancourt said Prince Harry must personally disclose why and how drafts of his memoir, Spare, and messages exchanged with his ghostwriter were destroyed “well after” he sued the publisher in 2019.
He said it was “troubling” that the documents and conversations, which likely contained references to unlawful information gathering, had been deleted when the case was already well under way and said that efforts must be made to retrieve the exchanges with author JR Moehringer.