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Prince Harry Faces Costs Battle in Failed $67m Daily Mail Lawsuit
0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prince Harry's legal team are preparing for a crunch court hearing in which they will try to limit the costs the duke and six other public figures have to pay in a lawsuit they lost against the publisher of the Daily Mail .
Associated Newspapers Limited indicated they will seek to recover more than £50 million [around $67 million] in legal costs successfully defending the case at the High Court in London. Harry is not expected to attend in person.
Judge Matthew Nicklin will hear arguments from the opposing parties over two days on July 29 and 30 before coming to a decision on what costs the claimants will have to pay. Some of the bill may be covered by insurance.
A filing by the newspaper's legal team, seen by Newsweek , read: "The Claimants’ individual cases were pursued for the most part without any supporting documentary evidence and on the barest inferential basis."
"Allegations of the utmost seriousness were put by the Claimants to Associated’s witnesses without any prior notice or evidential basis," it continued.
"At the same time, other serious allegations—including the most important elements of the allegations of perjury advanced against three of Associated’s senior executives—were either not put to the witnesses at all or only partially put, without at any stage being formally withdrawn.
"All of this was done with the benefit of absolute privilege and in the glare of full publicity, courted by and on the Claimants’ behalf."
The other litigants are musician Sir Elton John, his husband David Furnish, actors Elizabeth Hurley and Sadie Frost, racial justice campaigner Baroness Doreen Lawrence and politician Sir Simon Hughes.
Harry and the other claimants launched the case hoping to prove journalists from the Mail titles broke the law in gathering stories. The prince described the significant emotional impact of frenzied coverage which he said damaged his relationship with ex-girlfriend Chelsy Davy.
However, after winning on every allegation the Mail 's former editor-in-chief Paul Dacre, who ran the paper during the relevant period, described the case as "a conspiracy" to "destroy" the newspaper group. At the costs hearing, Associated will seek to force the claimants to pay as much of the bill as the judge will agree to.
The case was filed in 2022 and brought allegations that included phone hacking and unlawfully obtaining personal information using private investigators, as well as other unlawful practices.
Following a more than 10-week trial earlier this year, Mr Justice Nicklin dismissed all claims. The judge concluded Harry and the other claimants had failed to prove the articles and incidents they cited were the product of unlawful information gathering.
The judge accepted the explanations given by Mail journalists and rejected the argument that private information about their lives could only have been gathered illegally.
Harry's case included allegations Mail journalists had unlawfully obtained flight records for Chelsy Davy and had broken the law to find out about a phone call between him and Prince William about photographs published in an Italian newspaper of their mother Princess Diana dying.
"I do not recall reading this article at the time but it is really disgusting, especially with the crude headline and explicit reference to a phone call," Harry said in a witness statement seen by Newsweek .
"My brother and I were relatively young at the time (I was just 21) and we were having private conversations about photographs of our dead mother which had been put into the public domain. It was obviously a 'highly emotional call' for William and I as to what we should do."
The July 2006 story was headlined: "LET HER REST IN PEACE." Harry suggested in his statement the story had been obtained because "they were plainly listening in to calls."
However, Nicklin said in his judgment that "the pleaded case is thin" and "identifies no specific unlawful act," adding that the journalist, Rebecca English, offered the "entirely plausible" explanation the story had come from a palace press officer.
Overall, the judgment represented a significant setback for Harry, who spent years pursuing legal action against British newspaper groups and described reforming press practices as his "life’s work."
In a statement issued after the judgment, Harry and Lawrence described the outcome as "a complete and obvious whitewash," while ANL hailed the decision as an "overwhelming victory for the Daily Mail and its journalists, and for a free press generally."
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