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Journalism of Courage
Prince Harry on June 7 became the first high-ranking British royal member to testify in a court in over 130 years. He took the witness stand in a case, brought by him and three other claimants, against the Mirror newspaper group for its alleged use of unlawful methods like phone hacking to obtain information about them for stories between 1996 and 2011.
In his testimony and a 55-page witness statement, Harry gave evidence to London’s High Court of how the accused illegally targeted him, which severely impacted his mental health.
“Tabloids would routinely publish articles about me that were often wrong but interspersed with snippets of truth.,” he said in court. “This created an alternative and distorted version of me to the general public – the people I had to serve and interact with as a member of the Royal Family – to the point where any one of the thousands of people that I met or was introduced to on any given day, could easily have gone: ‘You know what, you’re an idiot. I’ve read all the stories about you and now I’m going to stab you.”
What is the case about?
The current case, “HRH Duke of Sussex vs. Mirror Group Newspapers Limited,” commenced in May this year and involves claims by Prince Harry alongside soap-opera actors Michael Le Vell and Nikki Sanderson and the ex-wife of comedian Paul Whitehouse, Fiona Wightman.
The petitioners alleged that journalists from the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, and The People newspapers procured private and confidential information about them through illegal means, like phone hacking, between 1996-2011, the BBC reported.
Out of these, Harry contended that journalists at the three tabloids accessed his voicemail messages and used other illicit methods to obtain his personal information.
Contending that his relationships fell apart as his friends and family were “dragged into the chaos”, Harry said he also started fearing that those around him were betraying him by leaking his information to the press.
Harry also recalled how his whereabouts were always known to the paparazzi and how the voicemail symbol on his phone would vanish before he could even listen to the voice messages on his phone. Owing to the lack of any “hard evidence of hacking”, Harry’s lawyers relied on 147 news articles published by the Mirror between 1996-2010, containing information they claim could have only been obtained through illegal means given its intimate nature, The New York Times said. Out of these 147 articles, 33 were selected to be considered at the trial.
What are the legal aspects surrounding Harry’s claim?
The case brings to the forefront the battle between aspects of media freedom and an individual’s privacy. Although it’s commonplace for a public figure’s privacy to be diluted because people have a right to know something which is in the public interest, Harry is making the point that some of the information about him could have only been procured unlawfully. For instance, while speaking about a Mirror article on his Mozambique trip with Chelsy Davy, Harry said he feared “flight blagging”, or the practice of using unlawful means or lies to obtain the couple’s travel details, the NYT stated.
However, in the 2006 House of Lords ruling in the case of “Jameel & Ors v Wall Street Journal Europe Sprl”, judge Brenda Hale referred to the “Reynolds Defence” on the issue of defamation vis-a-vis press freedom. “The public only has a right to be told if two conditions are fulfilled. First, there must be a real public interest in communicating and receiving the information” the court said, adding that it is very different from “information which interests the public” like “vapid tittle-tattle about the activities of footballers’ wives and girlfriends”, which although interests a major chunk of the population but cannot be claimed as having “any real public interest in our being told all about it,” the court said.
Moreover, this is not the first time Harry has sought action against the media for a breach of privacy. Since 2019, Harry and Meghan have filed at least seven lawsuits against British and US media organisations to hold them accountable for breaching their privacy and writing false stories about them, according to Reuters.
In January 2022, the Mail paid Markle £1 in damages for invading her privacy by publishing her private letter sent to her father, as part of her three-year-legal battle against Associated Newspapers, the Mail’s parent company.
What is Harry’s testimony?
Prince Harry’s two-day testimony witnessed several confessions from him as his barrister, David Sherborne, highlighted the damage caused by press intrusion.
During this, Harry told the court that phone hacking was done on an “industrial scale” by the newspaper group. To support this, Harry’s barrister read an email from Mirror journalist Katie Hind describing how to hack phones, while Harry added that he once found a “tracking device” on his ex-girlfriend’s car, The Guardian reported.
Additionally, Harry provided a 55-page written witness statement, a signed document recording a witness’s evidence and confirming it to be true.
Arguing that the press “played a destructive role” during his formative years, leading him into a “downward spiral”, and causing him bouts of depression and paranoia, the statement said that some editors and journalists had “blood on their hands” as their work had caused pain and “inadvertently” death. The statement was made about his late mother, Princess Diana, who was hounded by the press.
Blaming the paparazzi for the 1977 Paris car chase that subsequently led to the crash killing his mother, Harry said that the harassment and intrusion by the UK press, including allegedly racist articles about him and his wife, Meghan Markle, forced them to flee to the US in 2020, leaving the royal life behind.
What is the Mirror’s defence?
On his first day in court, Harry was cross-examined by the Mirror’s lawyer, Andrew Green, who suggested that the Mirror’s sources were based on official statements or publicly available information rather than phone tapping. As Green continued to deny that the Mirror’s actions were “all unlawful”, Prince Harry responded that he suspected several stories appearing in the tabloids between 1996-2011 involving his personal life details connected to payments made to a private investigator.
In a nutshell, the newspaper group is denying the phone-hacking claims, while contending that the details in those articles could have come from other legitimate sources or reporting techniques.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers, which publishes The Sun, and Associated Newspapers Ltd, which subsequently owns the Daily Mail and the Mail, had argued that the cases should be thrown out because Harry failed to file the lawsuits within a six-year deadline of discovering the alleged wrongdoing. Meanwhile, Harry’s lawyers had argued that the claimants should be granted an exception to the time limit since the publishers suppressed their illegal actions.
Have there been similar cases in India?
In the Indian context, a similar trend was observed in the September 2021 Bombay High Court ruling in “Shilpa Shetty Kundra v. Clapping Hands Pvt. Ltd.” Shetty had approached the court against the defamatory articles and videos published against her and her family after her husband, Raj Kundra’s arrest in July 2021, in connection with the production and distribution of pornographic movies.
Clarifying that it could not pass a blanket gag order on the media on reporting anything against Shetty, the court struck a balance by directing three Youtube videos to be deleted. “Traditional media will understand the rationale and competent advice. We cannot say the same about these private vloggers and bloggers,” Justice Patel said.
Moreover, in the 2017 ruling in “Justice K S Puttaswamy (retd) and Anr versus Union of India and Anr,” a nine-judge bench held privacy is a fundamental right, adding that it “is protected as an intrinsic part of the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21.”
