London — Britain’s High Court ruled that Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, was the victim of phone hacking by Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), publisher of the Daily Mirror tabloid, on Friday. He has been awarded 140,600 pounds, which is about $180,000 in damages.
The presiding judge in the case at Britain’s High Court, Justice Timothy Fancourt, said in a statement that he had awarded Harry the “modest” sum, as the case had shown the Mirror Group “only played a small part in everything that the Duke suffered” and “was not responsible for all the unlawful activity that was directed at the Duke, and that a good deal of the oppressive behaviour of the Press towards the Duke over the years was not unlawful at all.”
The judge said he’d found that only 15 out of the 33 articles that were scrutinized in the case were the product of phone hacking or other illegal information gathering.
“I consider that his phone was only hacked to a modest extent, and that this was probably carefully controlled by certain people at each newspaper,” Fancourt said. “There was a tendency for the Duke in his evidence to assume that everything published was the product of voicemail interception because phone hacking was rife within Mirror Group at the time. But phone hacking was not the only journalistic tool at the time, and his claims in relation to the other 18 articles did not stand up to careful analysis.”
He said he’d determined the award for the prince “in respect of each of the articles and invoices where unlawful information gathering was proved” and “to compensate the Duke fully for the distress that he suffered as a result of the unlawful activity directed at him and those close to him.”
In June, Prince Harry became the most senior royal to ever take the stand in a U.K. court case, testifying over two days in this case.
Harry, along with other U.K. celebrities, brought the suit against MGN over alleged phone hacking.
The Mirror Group has denied any unlawful information gathering in relation to the 207 newspaper stories mentioned in the case, though it previously admitted that the hacking of phones had taken place at its newspapers.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have filed at least seven lawsuits against U.S. and U.K. media outlets since 2019, and Harry is currently involved in four cases against U.K. tabloid newspapers.
He is also part of a group alleging unlawful information gathering at Associated Newspapers Limited, which publishes The Daily Mail, and against News Group Newspapers, which publishes The Sun tabloid.
