Prince Harry enters the witness box in fight against U.K. tabloid publisher

LONDON — Prince Harry entered the witness box on Wednesday in his final legal showdown with Britain’s tabloid media.

It is the estranged royal’s second time testifying in court, and comes as he leads a group of seven high-profile claimants, including Elton John and actors Elizabeth Hurley and Sadie Frost in a privacy lawsuit against one of Britain’s biggest news organizations, Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL).

They have accused the publisher of the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday newspapers, of using unlawful methods to snoop on them for sensational headlines, including the tapping and hacking of phones and obtaining private medical and financial records through deception, chiefly between 1993 and 2011.

ANL has strenuously denied the allegations and called them “preposterous smears.”

After a minor technical glitch delayed proceedings, Harry was questioned by ANL’s lawyer Antony White, who asked him if information in the articles could have come from friends or social circles.

“The kind of info that ends up in articles is not the kind of stuff that I would be talking about openly,” Harry replied. He added later that sources “were used as a cover to make up quotes,” and “disguise the true origin of information.”

Buckingham Palace in his experience, rarely corrected stories, Harry said. “It was more “just ignore it.”

Harry broke with tradition in 2023, when he became the first senior royal in 130 years to give evidence in court during a lawsuit against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), the publisher of the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People tabloids.

King Edward VII had been the last to do so when he testified as a witness in part of a divorce case in 1870 and 20 years later in a slander trial over a card game, both while he was Prince of Wales and before he became king.

Speculation has been rife about whether the end of the case could lead to a reconciliation with his father, King Charles III, after years of mounting royal tensions.

Prince William and Princess Kate are in Scotland this week. Their spokesperson declined to comment on whether the trio would meet up, as did a spokesperson for Harry. Charles was in London, but it was unclear whether he would meet up with his youngest son.

Harry, who is fifth-in-line to the throne, has blamed the tabloid press for the death of his mother, Princess Diana, and has been critical about their treatment of his wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.

He won a payout from MGN and in January 2025 he was awarded substantial damages and an apology from News Group Newspapers, Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper arm, which settled ahead of a trial.

ANL has denied the allegations.

In a submission to the court on Monday, White said ANL’s editors and journalists were “lining up” to reject the claimants’ “allegations of habitual and widespread phone hacking, phone tapping and blagging within the organization.”

It added that the claimants had ”failed to establish that the most serious categories of alleged unlawful information gathering – phone hacking and phone tapping – took place at Associated at all, and their allegation of burglary to order was struck out by the Court. The allegation that these practices were ‘habitual and widespread’ at Associated’s titles was simply untrue.”