Key Highlights
- “I think a lot of people within the royal family and outside will be hoping that once these court battles are over, Harry can turn his attention to reconciling with his family,” she added. This time around, Harry will be joined by Elton John and his husband, David Furnish, actors Sadie Frost and Elizabeth Hurley and former lawmaker Simon Hughes in his case against Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), the publisher of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers. Baroness Doreen Lawrence, whose son Stephen Lawrence was murdered in a racist attack in 1993, will also join the claimants.
- Her inclusion has been seen by some as significant because the Daily Mail campaigned for a long time to bring her son’s killers to justice, famously naming five people as his murderers on its front page.
- When two of the men, Gary Dobson and David Norris, were eventually convicted, the paper was praised for its coverage. The group’s lawyers have accused ANL of “grave breaches of privacy” and alleged that the newspaper group commissioned private investigators to unlawfully target their clients, tapped and hacked their phones, and obtained private medical and financial records through deception, chiefly between 1993 and 2011. Associated Newspapers Limited has strenuously denied the allegations.
- Asked for comment ahead of the trial on Thursday, the company referred NBC News to a previous statement issued in 2024 that called the claims “preposterous and without foundation.” It added that its defense submission said “the case brought by the Prince and others is ‘an affront to the hard-working journalists whose reputations and integrity, as well as those of Associated itself, are wrongly traduced.’”Baroness Doreen Lawrence, the mother of Stephen Lawrence, arrives with lawyer Imran Khan at the Royal Courts of Justice in October. Ben Whitley / PA Images via fileUnlike Lawrence, Harry is no stranger to this kind of litigation, having successfully sued Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) in 2023 and last year receiving “substantial damages” and an apology after settling a claim against News Group Newspapers, the publisher of The Sun. Both companies have paid out tens of millions of dollars to multiple claimants including celebrities, politicians and ordinary people after it emerged that some of their journalists and private investigators employed by their newspapers were hacking into phones and intercepting voicemails in the early 2000s. Until now, however, Associated Newspapers Limited has not been sued for phone hacking, which, if proved, “will reshape the story of modern British journalism,” according to media lawyer Mark Stephens.“Harry and his team characterize this as the last major test of the untouchable corner of the British press,” Stephens, who works at the London-based law firm Howard Kennedy LLP, said in a telephone interview last week.
- “It asks whether a major U. K.
