LONDON — Prince Harry took the witness stand Tuesday in a U.K. courtroom, becoming the first British royal to testify in a public court in over 100 years.
Harry, the Duke of Sussex, gave testimony as part of his case against Britain’s Daily Mirror tabloid newspaper for allegedly obtaining private information between 1991 and 2011, including phone hacking and intercepting voicemails.
The Mirror Group has denied any wrongdoing, saying it used documents, public statements, and sources to legally report on the prince and other members of the Royal Family.
Harry specifically named Fox Nation and Talk TV host Piers Morgan as one of those he was targeting in the case, accusing the broadcaster of conspiring to phone-hack his mother, Princess Diana.
“The thought of Piers Morgan and his band of journalists earwigging into my mother’s private and sensitive messages (in the same way as they have me) and then having given her a ‘nightmare time’ three months prior to her death in Paris, makes me feel physically sick,” Harry said.
Harry went on to claim that the articles published about himself and his family played a destructive role in his childhood, including making him paranoid.
“As a teenager and in my early 20s, I ended up feeling as though I was playing up to a lot of the headlines and stereotypes that [the tabloid press] wanted to pin on me mainly because I thought that, if they are printing this rubbish about me and people were believing it, I may as well ‘do the crime,’ so to speak,” he said in his prepared witness statement. “It was a downward spiral, whereby the tabloids would constantly try and coax me, a ‘damaged’ young man, into doing something stupid that would make a good story and sell lots of newspapers.”
Harry is just one of over 100 celebrities who are suing British media, including late television presenter Caroline Flack, whose suicide in 2020 was linked to negative press about her.
