Price Harry, Duke Of Sussex, said his upcoming court battle with Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers will be a money loser for him but provide “accountability’ if he wins the court fight set for January.
Harry has been suing UK tabloids for years with a recent victory over the Mirror Group Newspapers late last year. He’s one of only two plaintiffs still pushing ahead out of well over a thousand claims and 40 that joined his suit against News Group, publisher of The Sun and, formerly, the long defunct News of the World, over allegations of phone hacking and unlawful information gathering.
The publisher denies the allegations.
A settlement would have been more lucrative “a hundred times over,” Harry told the New York Times DealBook Conference in New York.
He said he couldn’t talk too much about the pending case.
“The hacking [claim] is almost 15 years old, the cover-up of the hacking … is relatively new, and I think that will be the piece that really shocks the world … The goal is accountability. That means that, unfortunately, the scale of the cover-up is so large that people need to see it for themselves.”
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle relocated to California in 2020 in a rift with the British royal family, founding Archewell, a nonprofit and production company. Both have been targets of social media hate speech and both are outspoken against it. Harry recently said he would fear for the safety of his wife Meghan Markle if they returned to the U.K. He said he worried that the couple’s negative press puts her at risk for an acid attack or a knife attack. He said the couple and their children have been the targets of retaliation during the last five years of the News lawsuit.
Of the U.S., he said, “I very much enjoy living here and brining my kids up here. It’s a part of my life that I never thought I’d be able to live. It’s the life I think my mom would have wanted for me … It’s huge. It’s a fantastic opportunity and I am truly grateful for that.”