Prince Harry is suing Mirror Group Newspaper Limited (amongst others), accusing the company of using unlawful means to obtain information, Reuters reports. As part of the testimony he supplied in early June, Harry mentioned an article from 2002 in which the writer suggested that Harry was a bastard child. Titled the “Plot to rob the DNA of Harry,” the article insinuated that the Duke of Sussex didn’t have the same DNA as his father. “At the time, when I was 18 years old and had lost my mother just six years earlier, stories such as this felt very damaging and very real to me. They were hurtful, mean and cruel,” Harry’s testimony read, according to Us Weekly. “I was always left questioning the motives behind the stories. Were the newspapers keen to put doubt into the minds of the public so that I might be ousted from the Royal Family?” he continued. The man pegged at Harry’s father? James Hewitt.
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In 2003, BBC News reported that Hewitt, “a war veteran, with 17 years of service in the Life Guards,” met the Princess of Wales at a party in Mayfair in 1986, two years after Harry was born. In his 2023 testimony, Harry says that he was unaware of this detail until 2014. The duke adds that the journalists who had been writing about the paternity rumors knew the information all along, thus had been furthering a narrative that they knew was completely false.
