{"id":2491934,"date":"2026-07-07T14:13:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-07T14:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2491934"},"modified":"2026-07-07T14:13:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T14:13:11","slug":"prince-harry-loses-landmark-privacy-case-against-daily-mail-publisher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/prince-harry-loses-landmark-privacy-case-against-daily-mail-publisher\/","title":{"rendered":"Prince Harry Loses Landmark Privacy Case Against Daily Mail Publisher"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\tPrince Harry<\/a> has lost his high-profile press intrusion lawsuit against one of the UK\u2019s most powerful newspaper groups.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Duke of Sussex, alongside other claimants including Liz Hurley and Elton John, accused\u00a0The Daily Mail <\/em>publisher of unlawful information gathering, including \u201cabhorrent criminal activity and gross breaches of privacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAll the claims have been dismissed, with High Court Judge Mr Justice Nicklin saying that the aggrieved parties had failed to prove their allegations.<\/p>\n

\n\tA summary of the judgment read: \u201cThe Court rejected the attempt to prove the claims by broad inference where there remained a legitimate and realistic possible lawful source pathway, or where the article-specific evidence did not prove that the relevant information must have been obtained unlawfully.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe lawsuit further alleged that Associated Newspapers commissioned individuals to listen to private telephone calls, paid police officials \u201cwith corrupt links to private investigators\u201d for inside information and impersonated individuals to obtain medical records.<\/p>\n

\n\tAssociated Newspapers said the claims were \u201cpreposterous smears which appear to be nothing more than a pre-planned and orchestrated attempt to drag the Mail titles into the phone hacking scandal concerning articles up to 30 years old.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPrince Harry was in the UK for the verdict, with the ruling coinciding with a London event for the Invictus Games. He gave evidence during the trial earlier this year, accusing Associated Newspapers of making Meghan Markle\u2019s life \u201ca misery.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tIn a statement, Associated Newspapers said: \u201cAssociated Newspapers welcomes today\u2019s judgement, which is an overwhelming victory for the Daily Mail and its journalists, and for a free press generally.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMr Justice Nicklin today cleared The Daily Mail<\/em> and The Mail on Sunday<\/em>, and dismissed every single one of the 97 allegations made by the claimants. In every case, the Judge accepted the honesty of our journalists\u2019 evidence on how they sourced their stories. This is a magnificent vindication of the Daily Mail<\/em>\u2019s journalism.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cFor some of the most outrageous allegations made when the case was launched in a blaze of publicity four years ago \u2013 placing bugs in people\u2019s cars and homes, listening to calls as they were made and illicitly accessing bank accounts \u2013 no credible evidence was ever presented. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAs we said at the time, these allegations were \u2018lurid\u2019 and \u2018preposterous,\u2019 and were a fishing expedition by the claimants and their legal teams in a politically motivated campaign to muzzle the free press.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe reputations of our decent and hard-working journalists were terribly impugned, and today they have been exonerated. As the judgement clearly shows, every single article was legitimately sourced.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAssociated Newspapers thanks Mr Justice Nicklin for the patience and wisdom he has displayed throughout this misguided legal action, which has wasted so much valuable court time and more than \u00a350m in legal costs.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe will look to resolve outstanding issues, including the recovery of the costs we have incurred while defending ourselves against this egregious litigation.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source deadline.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prince Harry has lost his high-profile press intrusion lawsuit against one of the UK\u2019s most powerful newspaper groups. The Duke of Sussex, alongside other claimants including Liz Hurley and Elton John, accused\u00a0The Daily Mail publisher of unlawful information gathering, including \u201cabhorrent criminal activity and gross breaches of privacy.\u201d All the claims have been dismissed, with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2491935,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[22730],"class_list":["post-2491934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty","tag-prince-harry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Prince-Harry-Loses-Landmark-Privacy-Case-Against-Daily-Mail-Publisher.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2491934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2491934"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2491934\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2491936,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2491934\/revisions\/2491936"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2491935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2491934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2491934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2491934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}