Prince Harry lost a privacy lawsuit. But he could still get his royal family back.
Prince Harry is having a bad week — and the royal relatives ostracizing him aren’t looking great either.
Harry, the younger son of Britain’s King Charles III, and six other high-profile defendants lost a privacy case Tuesday against Associated Newspapers Limited, publisher of the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday. A British judge dismissed all claims by the defendants, who included the singer Elton John and his husband, David Furnish, and actresses Sadie Frost and Elizabeth Hurley. They argued that the tabloids used unlawful tactics such as phone hacking to unearth details of their personal lives for articles published between 1993 and 2011.
Tuesday’s ruling emerged during a visit Harry is making to England to promote charities. But the trip was already overshadowed by an unusually public spat between the prince and palace officials.
In legal filings, Harry said it was “disturbing to feel that my every move, thought or feeling was being tracked and monitored just for the Mail to make money out of it.” Testifying emotionally in January, he called articles about his dating life “disgusting” and “creepy” and said it was “beyond cruel” to report “confidential discussions” he had after a photo of his dying mother was published in Italian media. “They continue to come after me,” he said of the tabloids. “They have made my wife’s life an absolute misery.”
The Mail publisher argued that the articles at issue were generated from lawful sources, such as information from aides, friends and publicists. In a statement summarizing the 400-plus-page ruling, Judge Matthew Nicklin of the UK High Court wrote that the claimants failed to prove “that the information