Prince Harry and Elton John showed up at a London court hearing into allegations that the Daily Mail tabloid committed widespread privacy breaches including snooping on phone calls and voicemails of celebrities.
(Bloomberg) — Prince Harry and Elton John showed up at a London court hearing into allegations that the Daily Mail tabloid committed widespread privacy breaches including snooping on phone calls and voicemails of celebrities.
Lawyers for Harry, Duke of Sussex, and a group of high-profile figures claim that the paper’s publisher Associated Newspapers Ltd historically was responsible for unlawful information gathering. The suit also includes actors Elizabeth Hurley and Sadie Frost.
The legal battle with the tabloid is reminiscent of the scandal involving Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which hacked into the mobile phones and voicemails of celebrities, law makers and royals. The subsequent disputes led to a number of arrests and convictions, plus recommendations for British media reform.
At the early-stage court hearing on Monday, the Daily Mail’s publisher asked a judge to impose reporting restrictions on some information included in the case, like the names of individual journalists involved, while it was decided whether it could proceed to a trial.
The newspaper’s lawyers argued that the case should be thrown out as some of the alleged instances are time-barred and certain information was improperly sourced from Lord Justice Leveson’s public inquiry into press ethics following the phone-hacking scandal, according to documents prepared for the hearing.
“We categorically deny the very serious claims made in this litigation and will vigorously defend them, if that proves necessary,” a spokesperson for Associated Newspapers said in a statement.
Lawyers for the celebrities alleged that from 1993 to as recently as 2018, people working for the newspapers intercepted voicemail messages, listened into live calls, got phone bills and medical records, and used private investigators on their behalf, according to court documents.
Harry was “largely deprived of important aspects of his teenage years,” due to suspicion and paranoia caused by the unlawful articles in the newspapers, his lawyer David Sherborne said in the filings.
“It is apparent to these individuals that the alleged crimes” are just “the tip of the iceberg — and that many other innocent people remain unknowing victims of similar terrible and reprehensible covert acts,” said a spokesperson for Hamlins, the lawyers representing some of the claimants, in an October statement.
Meanwhile, the Duke of Sussex, returning to the UK for the first time since his grandmother Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral, has been linked to a handful of legal battles with British newspapers over privacy issues in recent years.
It includes a case against Mirror Group Newspapers and his wife Meghan Markle’s case against Associated Newspapers over the publishing of a letter to her father.
Lawyers for other members of the group at Gunnnercooke and a representative for the Duke of Sussex didn’t respond to a request for comment.
–With assistance from Thomas Seal.
(Updates with more details in the eighth and ninth paragraph)
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