Prince Harry’s phone hacking trial against the publisher of the Daily Mirror has kicked off without him present in court — and the judge was not happy.
Harry’s lawyer said the Duke of Sussex would be unavailable to testify after opening statements because he’d taken a flight from Los Angeles on Sunday after the birthday of his two-year-old daughter, Lilibet.
“I’m a little surprised,” Justice Timothy Fancourt said, noting he had directed Harry to be in court for the first day of his case.
Mirror Group Newspaper’s lawyer, Andrew Green, said he was “deeply troubled” by Harry’s absence on the trial’s opening day.
Harry was scheduled to testify on Tuesday, but his lawyer was told last week the duke should attend Monday’s proceedings in London’s High Court in case the opening statements concluded before the end of the day.
The case against the publisher of the Daily Mirror is the first of the prince’s several lawsuits against the media to go to trial, and one of three alleging tabloid publishers unlawfully snooped on him in their cutthroat competition for scoops on the royal family.
Harry, 38, will be the first member of the British royal family in more than a century to testify in court and is expected to describe his anguish and anger over being hounded by the media throughout his life, and its impact on those around him.
He has blamed paparazzi for causing the car crash that killed his mother, the late Princess Diana, and said harassment and intrusion by the UK press, including allegedly racist articles, ultimately led him and his wife, Meghan, to flee to the US in 2020 and leave royal life behind.
Articles he has cited date back to this 12th birthday when the Mirror reported he was feeling “badly” about the divorce of his mother and father, now King Charles III.
The reports made Harry wonder who he could trust as he feared friends and associates were betraying him by leaking information to the newspapers, he said in court documents.
His circle of friends grew smaller and he suffered “huge bouts of depression and paranoia”. Relationships fell apart as the women in his life – and even their family members – were “dragged into the chaos”.
He says he later discovered that the source wasn’t disloyal friends but aggressive journalists and the private investigators they hired to eavesdrop on voicemails and track him to locations as remote as Argentina and an island off Mozambique.
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Mirror Group Newspapers said it didn’t hack Harry’s phone and its articles were based on legitimate reporting techniques.
The publisher admitted and apologised for hiring a private eye to dig up dirt on one of Harry’s nights out at bar, but the resulting 2004 article headlined “Sex on the beach with Harry” was not among the 33 in question at trial.
Mirror Group said it has settled more than 600 of some 830 unlawful information-gathering claims and paid out more than £100 million pounds ($188 million).
The opening statements being presented on Monday mark the second phase of the trial in which Harry and three others have accused the Mirror of phone hacking and unlawful information gathering.
In the first part, attorney David Sherborne, who represents Harry and the others, including two actors from the Coronation Street soap opera, said the unlawful acts were “widespread and habitual” at the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People, and carried out on “an industrial scale”.
The publisher has presented former executives and lawyers who denied knowing about wrongdoing when it was happening or engaging in a cover-up. The first lawsuits against Mirror Group were filed in 2012 and the newspapers printed an apology in 2015 to hacking victims.
Two judges — including Justice Timothy Fancourt, who is overseeing the trial — are in the process of deciding whether Harry’s two other phone hacking cases will proceed to trial.
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Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers, publisher of The Sun, and Associated Newspapers Ltd, which owns the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, have argued the cases should be thrown out because Harry failed to file the lawsuits within a six-year deadline of discovering the alleged wrongdoing.
Harry’s lawyer has argued that he and other claimants should be granted an exception to the time limit, because the publishers lied and deceived to hide the illegal actions.
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