Prince Harry has agreed to a last-minute settlement with News Group Newspapers (NGN) — in the same week the case was set to go to trial.
An eleventh-hour deal between the Duke of Sussex, 40, and NGN was announced Wednesday after both parties were embroiled in intense negotiations for 24 hours.
Proceedings at London’s High Court were due to kickstart Tuesday, however were pushed back several times after repeated requests from both legal teams.
On Wednesday, Harry’s attorney, David Sherborne, said the parties had reached an agreement, adding that NGN had offered an apology in addition to “substantial damages.”
In a statement, NGN “acknowledged, without any admission of illegality, that NGN’s response to the 2006 arrests and subsequent actions were regrettable.”
Harry, who did not appear in court this week, brought forward claims of wrongdoing by the publisher, and was due to take his case to court for an up to 10-week trial.
The former working royal joined forces with former Labour Party deputy leader Tom Watson against the publisher over alleged unlawful information gathering between 1996 and 2011.
The apology, made out to Harry and his estranged father King Charles, stated NGN’s regret over “the serious intrusion into his private life,” Sherborne read in court.
The group also apologized for diving into the private life of Harry and Prince William’s late mother, Princess Diana, during her “younger years” prior to her untimely death in 1997.
NGN said its agreements with both parties “draws a line under the past” and effectively “brings an end to this litigation.”
“There are strong controls and processes in place at all our titles today to ensure this cannot happen now,” an NGN spokesperson added. “There was no voicemail interception on The Sun.”
The Post, which shares the same parent company as The Sun, has reached out to Harry’s reps for further comment.
The prince — who became the first senior British royal for 130 years to give evidence in court when he appeared as the star witness at a separate phone-hacking trial in June 2023 — had previously sued Mirror Group Newspapers, the publisher of the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People in 2019.
The duke, who quit royal life in 2020 and currently resides in the US, said he was targeted by MGN for 15 years since 1996, and that more than 140 stories that appeared in its papers were the result of unlawful information gathering, though the trial only considered 33 of these.
Harry was ultimately awarded $180,700 in Dec. 2023 after London’s High Court ruled he had been the victim of “modest” phone-hacking and other unlawful information gathering by journalists on British newspapers.
With Post wires
