King Charles Had 2 Words to Describe Prince Harry’s Hacking Lawsuit With British Tabloid
King Charles III summed up Prince Harry’s hacking lawsuit against a British tabloid with two words. In Spare, the Duke of Sussex’s 2023 memoir, he recounted speaking to his father about the lawsuit, which has since ended (more on that ahead). Plus, how he responded.
Charles called Harry’s hacking lawsuit a ‘suicide mission’
Beyond unflattering passages about fellow royals in Spare and what drove him and Meghan Markle to relocate to the U.S., Harry revisited a tense conversation he had with his father and brother.
Specifically, the one that took place after Prince Philip’s funeral on April 17, 2021, where the now-king and now-Prince of Wales met him at Frogmore Gardens near Windsor Castle.
The same one where William used his and Harry’s “secret code,” and their father pleaded with them not to make his final years “misery.”
A topic that came up was, according to Harry, the hacking lawsuit he launched against Mirror Group Newspapers, or MGN, a British tabloid publisher.
“Pa and Willy were still claiming not to know why I’d fled Britain, still claiming not to know anything, and I was getting ready to walk away,” Harry wrote (via Spare). “Then one of them brought up the press. They asked about my hacking lawsuit.”
The now-39-year-old went on, saying, “They still hadn’t asked about Meg. But they were keen to know how my lawsuit was going because that directly affected them.”
His response? “‘Still ongoing,’” to which King Charles “mumbled” two words: “‘Suicide mission.’” At that, Harry replied, “‘Maybe. But it’s worth it.’”
Tabloid lawsuits contributed to the friction between Harry, Meghan Markle, and the royal family
By this time, things between the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and their close royal relatives had become strained, to say the least.
Prior to Harry’s 2021 conversation with King Charles and William, there’d already been failed “clear the air” meetings, tears over bridesmaids’ dresses, and a supposed physical altercation.
As Harry and Meghan explained in their 2022 Netflix docuseries, “everything changed” when the tabloid lawsuits started. Not Harry’s hacking case, but another, which they later won, regarding the publication of a letter Meghan wrote to her estranged father, Thomas Markle.
“We had to draw a line,” Meghan told Netflix, saying the royal family did nothing. “My father,” Harry recalled, “said to me: ‘Darling boy, you can’t take on the media, the media will always be the media.’”
Nevertheless, Harry and Meghan decided to file a lawsuit in 2019, which the former Suits star described as the moment when “everything changed.”
“That litigation was probably the catalyst for all of the unraveling,” Meghan said.
Harry won his tabloid hacking lawsuit in 2023
A judge ruled in December 2023 that Harry’s phone was indeed hacked by journalists and private investigators working at the Daily Mirror, as the duke claimed (via AP News).
Justice Timothy Fancourt called phone hacking a “widespread and habitual” practice at MGN in a nearly 400-page ruling, saying the paper’s executives covered it up.
MGN was ordered to pay Harry approximately $180,000 for using unlawful information gathering in 15 of the 33 articles examined during the trial.
