LONDON - Prince Harry, the estranged younger son of King Charles, and other high-profile British figures on Tuesday lost their privacy lawsuits against the publisher of the Daily Mail, which they had accused of widespread unlawful behaviour.
Harry, who was in London when the High Court delivered its ruling, has brought several legal cases against the British press and has long railed against their alleged abuse of power.
The prince, 41, who has long blamed the press for the 1997 Paris car crash that killed his mother, Princess Diana, saw bringing the lawsuit against the Daily Mail publisher as his “public duty”.
He held back tears in the witness box in January as he said the Daily Mail had made his wife Meghan’s life “an absolute misery”.
Harry said in a documentary released in 2024 that his legal battles with Britain’s tabloid press had contributed to the breakdown of his relationship with the royal family. “It’s certainly a central piece to it,” Harry told the broadcaster ITV in the documentary Tabloids on Trial.
He had previously won against the publisher of the Daily Mirror tabloid and settled a claim with Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper arm, but Tuesday’s ruling is a significant defeat in his battles with the media.
He and the other claimants, including Elton John, alleged dozens of stories about them published by Associated Newspapers in the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday from the 1990s to 2011 were based on information that had been obtained unlawfully.
Associated Newspapers said the allegations were smears and the claims against it were dismissed in their entirety on Tuesday, in what the publisher called “an overwhelming victory for the Daily Mail and its journalists”.
Judge Matthew Nicklin said in a summary of his ruling that the claimants had needed to prove that information published about them had been obtained unlawfully, but suspicion was not enough.
“The court rejected the argument that, simply because information was private, and because Associated could not positively explain how it had been sourced, the relevant article must have been unlawfully sourced,” the summary said.
Prince Harry arrived in Britain on Monday evening for five days of engagements, many to do with the Invictus Games, an event he has championed for wounded war veterans.
The visit got off to a bad start when he decided not to bring his young children at the last minute over security concerns, and was then told he could not stay at Buckingham Palace.
Harry, 41, has lived in California since 2020 with his American wife after he quit as a working royal, exposing a deep rift in the family, which he has since said he wanted to repair.
The ruling in the high-profile privacy case is the last outstanding court battle for Harry.
The legal teams have estimated the costs of the case will run into tens of millions of pounds, a tab that the losing side will mainly have to pay.
