| Prince Harry’s day in court |
| Prince Harry took the stand in London yesterday to accuse the Mirror Newspaper Group of hacking his cellphone more than a decade ago. Over five hours of polite but persistent grilling, Harry said that reporters intercepted his voice mail messages and used other unlawful means to dig up personal information about him. |
| Harry, who is the first prominent royal to testify since the 19th century, declared that editors and journalists “have blood on their hands” because of the lengths to which they went to ferret out news about him and his family, not least his mother, Diana, who died in a car crash in 1997 after being pursued by photographers. He is expected to continue testifying today. |
| A lawyer for the Mirror Group, Andrew Green, pressed the prince for evidence that journalists had hacked his phone, arguing that information that Harry said was illegally obtained was available elsewhere. Harry in turn insisted there was no way the Mirror’s reporters could have so quickly discovered his whereabouts, or the details of a schoolyard injury, without resorting to illegal methods. |
| Details: Harry is one of four plaintiffs in the case, one of two civil suits rooted in a phone hacking scandal from 2011 that have made it to trial. The Mirror Group’s lawyers argue that Harry waited too long to file the lawsuit, noting that the alleged misconduct occurred between 1991 and 2011. |
