(London) Prince Harry has accused the British royal family of withholding information from him about telephone tapping carried out by British tabloids, in a statement released on Tuesday as part of the legal proceedings he has brought against the publisher of the Daily Mail.
King Charles III’s youngest son attended a hearing at the High Court in London for the second day in a row on Tuesday in the multi-celebrity lawsuit against the Associated Newspaper (ANL), accused of gathering information in a manner illegal.
In his witness statement signed on February 24 and which AFP was able to consult, Harry evokes his “difficult relationship with the press” since the death of his mother Diana, but explains that “for a member of the institution, politics was ‘never complain, never explain'”.
He says the royals dissuaded him from suing the press because “it might open a Pandora’s box.”
“There is no doubt that the [royal] institution has long withheld information about phone hacking from me, and this has only become clear in recent years when I filed my own complaint. »
Harry, who only travels to the UK exceptionally, made a surprise visit to London to attend the hearing at which ANL is trying to defeat the lawsuits brought by the king’s son, but also singer Elton John or the actress Liz Hurley.
The six plaintiffs accuse ANL of employing detectives to wiretap them.
The group has “totally and unequivocally refuted these preposterous defamations” which they say seek “to embroil Mail headlines in the wiretapping scandal over 30-year-old articles”.
The British tabloid press was shaken about ten years ago by several scandals of illegal wiretapping practiced from the beginning of the 2000s.
Harry’s visit to the UK comes just over a month before the king’s coronation on May 6. Exiled to the United States after crashing out of the monarchy in 2020, Harry and his wife Meghan have been invited to the ceremony, but have not yet publicly announced whether they will honor the invitation.
After a documentary aired on Netflix in December, Harry released his controversial memoir Spare in early January in which he details the breakdown of his relationship with his father and brother William.
