BRITAIN’S PRINCE HARRY has accused the press of having “blood” staining their “typing fingers”, with some responsible for causing pain, upset and death.
Harry is suing Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) for damages, claiming journalists at its titles, which also include the Sunday Mirror and Sunday People, were linked to methods including phone hacking, so-called “blagging” or gaining information by deception, and use of private investigators for unlawful activities.
The duke arrived at the Rolls Building this morning, which was surrounded by journalists and a heavy police presence, and entered the witness box of Court 15 shortly after 10.30am, swearing on a bible ahead of his cross-examination by MGN’s barrister.
In his witness statement for the case, Harry branded journalists the “mothership of online trolling”.
“Trolls react and mobilise to stories they create. People have died as a result, and people will continue to kill themselves by suicide when they can’t see any other way out,” he said.
“How much more blood will stain their typing fingers before someone can put a stop to this madness(?)”
He warned that without proper press regulation, which he accused the current UK government of “clearly” having “no appetite for because their friends in the press said so”, press harassment would only get worse.
Harry said finding out about the “level of cover up is what makes me want to see my MGN claim through to the end, so people can really understand what happened”.
He accused “those in power” of turning a blind eye to allow the alleged illegal action continue unabated and said the situation was “appalling”.
“The fact they’re all ganging up to protect each other, like they first did after Leveson, is the most disturbing part of it all, especially as they’re the mothership of online trolling,” the duke said.
He also said he was “shocked and appalled” by the number of payments made by MGN titles to private investigators.
The duke added: “I now realise that my acute paranoia of being constantly under surveillance was not misplaced after all.
“I was upset to discover the amount of suspicious call data and the 13 private investigator payments for Chelsy (Davy, his ex-girlfriend).
“Had she not been in a relationship with me, she would never have had to endure such a horrific experience at the hands of MGN’s journalists.
“There are even eight private investigator payments made in relation to my mother, which I have only learnt of since bringing my claim. This makes me feel physically sick.”
Harry alleges that about 140 articles published between 1996 and 2010 contained information gathered using unlawful methods, and 33 of these have been selected to be considered at the trial.
Under cross examination from Andrew Green KC, for MGN, Harry said: “Every single article has caused me distress,” to which Green then asked if each individual article had caused him distress.
Harry replied: “Yes, without question.”
Green then asked the duke about part of his case which states that he was caused particular distress “because he is a very private person” and was in the public eye at a young age.
Harry said: “I believe that as a child, every single one of these articles played an important role in my growing up.”
However, he added that he could not confirm whether he remembered reading specific articles at the time they were published, adding that there were “millions” of articles “that have been written about me since age 12”.
The duke later said that when information he had only told to a few members of his inner circle was made public, “your circle of friends starts to shrink”.
He said that he now believes that both his and his associates’ voicemail messages were hacked by MGN, and that it also used “other unlawful means” to obtain private information.
He continued: “The fact that the defendant’s journalists and those instructed on their behalf were listening in to private and sensitive voicemails at the level of detail discussed in this statement rather suggests that they could have heard anything and everything.
This not only creates a huge amount of distress but presented very real security concerns for not only me but also everyone around me. I would say their actions affected every area of my life.
Green asked Harry if he meant “blood on their hands” in relation to a specific article, and further asked him what he meant by it.
Harry said: “Some of the editors and journalists that are responsible for causing a lot of pain, upset and in some cases, speaking personally, death.”
He then said his reference to “blood on their hands” was “more broadly towards the press” in general, adding: “I haven’t named the journalists in that particular paragraph.”
During cross examination, Green questioned Harry about a Daily Mirror article publisher in September 1996 entitled “Diana so sad on Harry’s big day”.
The court heard that Harry has complained about the article containing details of his feelings regarding the divorce of his parents and the ill health of a family friend.
Green said the duke was first issued with a mobile phone when he went to Eton in 1998, putting it to Harry that the 1996 article could not have involved phone hacking.
Harry replied: “That’s incorrect. My security at school had a separate room with a landline.”
He said “most Sunday nights”, after being dropped off by his mother “the first thing we would do is to use the phone to ring her… in floods of tears”.
Harry also said it could have been his mother who was hacked, but Green replied “that’s just speculation you’ve come up with now”.
Green said the article reported that Harry at the time was “believed to be taking the royal divorce badly”, with the duke replying: “Like most children I think, yes”.
The barrister said such information was not saying anything that was not “pretty obvious”.
The duke said there was “no legitimacy” in putting such information in the newspaper, adding that “the methods in which it was obtained seem incredibly suspicious”.
Harry was also challenged over discrepancies between his autobiography Spare and his witness statement over whether he wanted to meet ex-royal butler Paul Burrell, whom he admitted branding a “two-faced shit”.
Burrell, a former confidant of Princess Diana, released a tell-all book about Harry’s late mother in 2003 after being cleared of stealing from her estate.
Harry agreed he would have used the phrase to describe Burrell, with the words appearing in a 2003 article in The People newspaper. “That is how I have always seen him,” he said.
The duke claims his remarks about Burrell were obtained illegally by MGN from a voicemail he left for his brother, Prince William. MGN denies the allegations.
Harry said in his witness statement that report in The People “accurately” set out his “disagreement” with William, with his brother wanting to meet Burrell and Harry “firmly against” doing so.
Harry told the court: “This kind of article seeds distrust between brothers.”
He added: “Those are words that I used and I certainly left voicemails on my brother’s phone.”
But Green revealed that Harry wrote in his controversial memoir Spare that he wanted to fly back to confront Burrell, rather than being against a meeting.
Reading out excerpts from the book, he quoted Harry as writing: “It made my blood boil. I wanted to fly home to confront him.”
The extract, written from Harry’s perspective, told how he phoned his father, now the King, to say he was getting on a plane to return to the UK from a trip to the Australian outback but that Charles and William talked him out of it.
A statement issued by the brothers from Clarence House at the time condemned Burrell, with the former royal servant saying he wanted to meet William and Harry and the prince’s spokesperson saying they were prepared to do so.
Green said, reading from Spare, that Harry wrote he “waited anxiously” for the meeting and counted the days but it did not happen at that time which was a “shame”.
Quizzing Harry about the discrepancy, the barrister said Harry made it “absolutely clear” in Spare that he wanted a meeting with Burrell.
Harry told the court: “The time gap between the original article and when I wrote this book was rather a large gap between the two.”
Green said: “Your position is that at the time you didn’t want a meeting, or you did want a meeting, what is the true position?”
Harry replied: “I honestly can’t remember whether I wanted a meeting or not.”
Green added: “Is it your position that you do actually remember leaving a voicemail on William’s phone saying that?”
The duke responded: “I was leaving voicemails for my brother and that is the terminology I used for Burrell.”
However, he said he did not specifically recall leaving William a voice message saying that.
Earlier during the cross-examination, Green asked Harry about an article headlined “Snap: Harry breaks thumb like William” which appeared in the Daily Mirror in November 2000.
Harry confirmed to Green that he complains about the reporting in this article of an injury to his thumb and added: “I do not believe that is in the public interest.”
The duke said he was not aware the information about his thumb had been reported by the Press Association, now the PA news agency, in an article the day before the Mirror one which quoted a Palace spokesperson.
Asked whether he had expressed any concerns to the Press Association about that article, Harry said he had not, adding that he was “not aware” of it.
He was then asked whether he had expressed concerns to other media outlets that reported the same story at the time, to which he responded he had not because unlawful information-gathering was “not systemic” at those titles.
Harry said he believed information in the Mirror article which was obtained through unlawful means included a paragraph stating that doctors had told him he could not play football for a few weeks.
He added that this had affected him as a “young man at school” who had to go to the medical centre and could not now “trust the doctors”.
The duke also said he had not expressed any concerns about a BBC article, adding: “As far as I know, the BBC hasn’t been brought into question with regard to unlawful information-gathering.”
Green asked the duke if he still maintains the information in the Mirror article by the newspaper’s then-royal editor Jane Kerr, who is due to give evidence on Wednesday, resulted from unlawful information-gathering.
Harry replied: “I believe it was, either probably herself or she got someone else to do her dirty work for her.”
Asked whose phone he believes was hacked to find out the information, he said: “The doctor’s? I am not sure.”
Green asked: “Are you not in the realms of total speculation?”, to which Harry replied: “No, I do not believe so.”
The court finished for the day shortly after 4.30pm, with Mr Justice Fancourt telling Harry he must not discuss his evidence with anyone overnight. He will return to the witness box tomorrow.
The 38-year-old’s claim is being heard alongside three other “representative” claims during a trial which began last month and is due to last six to seven weeks.
MGN is contesting the claims and has either denied or not admitted each of them.
The publisher also argues that some of the claimants have brought their legal action too late.
On the first day of the trial, lawyers for MGN said the publisher “unreservedly apologises” to the duke for one instance of unlawful information-gathering and that it accepts he is entitled to “appropriate compensation”.
Green said it is admitted that a private investigator was instructed, by an MGN journalist at The People, to unlawfully gather information about Harry’s activities at the Chinawhite nightclub one night in February 2004.
“Otherwise, the specified allegations are denied, or in a few cases not admitted,” he added.
At the start of the duke’s cross examination, Green apologised to the duke in person on behalf of MGN, repeating the publisher’s “unreserved apology” to him at the outset of the trial for one instance of unlawful activity.
He said: “MGN unreservedly apologises to you for that, it should never have happened and it will never happen again.”
Green told Harry that, if the judge finds that MGN was responsible for any further acts of unlawful information gathering, “you will be entitled to, and will receive, a more extensive apology”.
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