Prince Harry’s lawyer announced on Wednesday that he had reached a settlement with Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers over accusations of unlawful information gathering — an abrupt end to a case that Harry had cast as a last chance to hold the tabloids to account for years of predatory behavior.
News Group Newspapers offered Harry “a full and unequivocal apology” for hacking his cellphone and intruding into his personal life, and acknowledged “unlawful” conduct by private investigators hired by one of the tabloids, The Sun. It was the first time News Group has admitted wrongdoing involving that paper.
The company also apologized for past intrusions by its journalists into the private life of Harry’s mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, who died in a car accident in Paris in 1997 while being pursued by photographers.
In its statement, News Group apologized to Harry for “the impact on him of the extensive coverage and serious intrusion into his private life as well as the private life of Diana, Princess of Wales, his late mother, in particular during his younger years.”
It added: “We acknowledge and apologize for the distress caused to the duke, and the damage inflicted on relationships, friendships and family, and have agreed to pay him substantial damages,” referring to Harry by his alternative title, the Duke of Sussex.
The settlement, announced the day after the long-awaited trial was scheduled to begin, spared News Group Newspapers from weeks of damaging testimony about phone hacking and other unlawful methods it used more than a decade ago to ferret out information about Harry and other prominent figures.
Harry’s lawyers had planned to assert that senior executives of News Group purged emails about hacking and other wrongful practices. Among the executives whose actions would have been scrutinized in court were Mr. Murdoch’s younger son, James Murdoch; Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News U.K.; and Will Lewis, a former senior executive at the company who is now the publisher of The Washington Post. All three denied wrongdoing.
The settlement also spared Harry, 40, the younger son of King Charles III, from heavy financial risk, regardless of how he had fared in court. Under English law designed to resolve disputes out of court where possible, Harry would have been required to pay the legal costs of both sides unless the court awarded him an amount equal to what News Group Newspapers offered him in the settlement.
The last-minute deal underscored the unforgiving economics for private individuals taking on deep-pocketed corporations in Britain. Mr. Murdoch’s companies have used lucrative payoffs to avert trials in some 1,300 cases stemming from the phone hacking scandal. Among those who have settled is the actor Hugh Grant.
Mr. Grant said in April that he had felt forced to settle, because “even if every allegation is proven in court, I would still be liable for something approaching £10 million in costs. I’m afraid I am shying at that fence.”
In the United States, Mr. Murdoch’s Fox News paid $787.5 million in April 2023 to settle a defamation suit brought by a voting machine company, Dominion Voting Systems, over the cable network’s promotion of disinformation about the 2020 election that Dominion claimed had harmed the company.
News Group Newspapers did not disclose the amount it had agreed to pay Harry or his fellow claimant, Tom Watson, a former deputy leader of the Labour Party, to whom News Group also offered “a full and unequivocal apology,” but in both cases it said the amounts were “substantial.”
The company apologized to Mr. Watson for what it described as “the unwarranted intrusion carried out into his private life during his time in government by The News of the World during the period 2009-2011.” It admitted that this included his “being placed under surveillance in 2009 by journalists at The News of the World and those instructed by them.”
If the trial had gone ahead, Harry’s testimony in court could have cast a spotlight on the royal family’s past dealings with the news media, since he was likely to refer to deals that other family members, including King Charles, struck with News Group. His older brother, Prince William, settled a suit for a “huge sum of money,” Harry said in a legal filing earlier in the case.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
