Prince Harry‘s phone-hacking case against the publisher behind British tabloid newspaper, The Sun, has been thrown out of court by a UK judge. The decision brings to a close Harry’s high-profile battle against the publisher over claims that tabloids had hacked his phone to obtain his voicemails between 1996 and 2011.
The Duke of Sussex first took the case against News Group Newspapers, the publisher of the now-defunct News of the World, The Sun and the Daily Mirror, in 2019. As part of the case, the 38-year-old former working royal also alleged that a “secret agreement” existed between Buckingham Palace and the press that prevented him from taking the lawsuit earlier. This claim was also dismissed with a court calling the alleged arrangement implausible.
According to the Daily Mail, Harry alleged that the secret deal prevented him and Prince William from taking legal action against NGN until other litigation was settled. In recent years, Harry has insinuated that the royal family deliberately works with British tabloids in order to craft their public image. “After many, many years of lies being told about me and my family, there comes a point where, going back to the relationship between certain members of the family and the tabloid press, those certain members have decided to get in the bed with the devil … to rehabilitate their image,” he said in a January interview while promoting his memoir Spare.
However, the Daily Mail reports that a judge ruled that Harry’s claims about this longstanding agreement are unsubstantiated as there is “no witness or documentary evidence to support what the Duke claimed.” In the ruling, this judge also reportedly declared that Harry’s case had “not reached the necessary threshold of plausibility and cogency.” NGN declared the ruling “a significant victory” and, of the alleged agreement, noted that “it is quite clear there was never any such agreement and it is only the Duke who has ever asserted there was.”
Before you go, click here to see all the wild and heartbreaking details from Prince Harry’s memoir Spare.
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