The Duke of Sussex was made to feel “paranoid beyond belief” by alleged unlawful information gathering by the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday, a court has heard.
Prince Harry is among seven high-profile claimants, including Sir Elton John and Liz Hurley, alleging the papers’ publisher, Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), committed “grave breaches of privacy” over a 20-year period.
The prince felt his “every move, thought or feeling was being tracked and monitored just for the Mail to make money out of it”, according to a written submission by his lawyer.
ANL said the duke’s social circle was “known to be a good source of leaks” to the press and has repeatedly denied the claimants’ allegations.
Antony White KC, representing the publisher, said it was “a striking feature of the case that none of the articles were the subject of complaint by the claimants at the time of publication”.
“The pattern of misconduct the claimants seek to establish is simply not made out.”
Joining the duke in bringing the lawsuit against ANL are:
- Actors Liz Hurley and Sadie Frost
- Sir Elton John and his husband David Furnish
- Sir Simon Hughes, the former Liberal Democrat MP
- Baroness Doreen Lawrence, a campaigner whose son Stephen Lawrence was murdered in a racist attack in south London in 1993
Prince Harry was present in the courtroom on Monday for the first day of the trial, which is expected to last nine weeks.
David Sherborne, representing the claimants, quoted the prince in his written submission as saying the papers’ alleged activity created “distrust and suspicion”.
He said the “intrusion” was “terrifying” for his loved ones while “isolating me”.
Sherborne said the alleged unlawful information gathering in the duke’s case was related to 14 articles between 2001 and 2013.
The Daily Mail’s current royal editor, Rebecca English, was accused of “obtaining the exact plane seats, flight times and travel plans” of Prince Harry’s then-girlfriend, Chelsy Davy, in December 2007.
Sherborne alleged the information was obtained through private investigator Mike Behr, who was accused of suggesting he could “plant someone next to her” on the flight to South Africa.
For the publisher, White said English “strongly denies that she ever used Mr Behr for unlawful information-gathering”, and the allegation was “unsupported by the evidence before the court”.
He said the prince’s social circle “at all material times… was and was known to be a good source of leaks or disclosure of information to the media about what he got up to in his private life.”
He said all the articles “were sourced entirely legitimately from information variously provided by contacts of the journalists responsible”, including press officers and publicists, freelance journalists, photographers and prior reports.
White also said the duke discussed his private life in the media and that information about his life was provided by Palace spokespeople.
Sherborne said there had been “systematic and sustained use of unlawful information gathering” at the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday and that there was “no way” that details reported in some articles could have been lawfully obtained.
In their joint opening statement, the claimants accused a string of senior Mail and Mail on Sunday journalists of commissioning and using unlawfully gathered information from private investigators.
They said they were “engaged in or complicit in the culture of unlawful information gathering that wrecked the lives of so many”.
Sir Elton and Furnish accused ANL of “stealing” their son Zachary’s birth certificate before they “had a chance to see it ourselves,” accusing the publisher of “invasion of medical details”.
White said in written submissions that their claims were “unsupported by any evidence before the court and utterly baseless”.
Mail on Sunday journalist Katie Nicholl was accused of having obtained intimate information about Frost’s private life, including the termination of her pregnancy, about which the actor had not even told her mother.
Notebooks showed “Susie” of ELI, a private investigation firm, provided information on the point, Sherborne said, adding that days later there were payments recorded as “KATIE NICHOLLS URGENT ENQ” and “K NICHOLLS SEARCHES”.
Baroness Lawrence said she felt she had been targeted as she sought the truth about her son’s murder.
She said she felt she “could not even grieve the injustice of what was happening privately, even for a day” and that she had been made “a victim all over again”.
Her allegations concern five articles published between 1997 and 2007, written by veteran Daily Mail crime correspondent Stephen Wright.
The claims include that he made payments of thousands in cash for “special contacts re Stephen Lawrence” and “special inquiries”, and that he got “well-known blagger” Christine Hart to call Baroness Lawrence pretending to be a journalist from the Guardian, as it was believed she would be more likely to speak to her.
Baroness Lawrence said she was “angry that the Mail seems more interested in interrogating me about how I found out what they did to me… then threatening to question me at trial about all this, rather than saying sorry, investigating what they did, and getting at the truth of what happened”.
White said the allegations against the reporter were “denied in their entirety” and were “unsupported by the available evidence”.
Sherborne, meanwhile, said ANL had kept up a “hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil defence”, claiming that during the 2012 Leveson public inquiry – into the culture, practice and ethics of the press – the publisher argued there had been no unlawful activity at all.
He said ANL “knew they had skeletons in their closet” because the company investigated the use of phone hacking between 2003 and 2005, finding evidence in stories that the technique had been used.
ANL has repeatedly denied the allegations, calling them “lurid” and “preposterous”.
White said: “In relation to almost every article alleged to be the product of phone hacking or phone tapping, Associated is able to call a witness or witnesses to explain how the article was, in fact, sourced.”
The lawyer added that “the pattern of misconduct the claimants seek to establish is simply not made out.”
This is a civil trial, so there is no jury. The judge, Mr Justice Nicklin, will decide the case on his own.
It is Prince Harry’s third major court battle, accusing newspaper groups of unlawful behaviour.
In December 2023, he won 15 claims in his case, accusing Mirror Group Newspapers of unlawfully gathering information for stories published about him.
In January 2025, the publisher of the Sun newspaper agreed to pay “substantial damages” and issued an apology to the prince over claims of unlawful intrusion into his life.
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