Prince Harry Gets Candid in Court About Rumors That Charles is Not His Father
Prince Harry took the stand again Tuesday in his landmark phone hacking lawsuit against British media company, Mirror Group. Harry
Ivy Griffith
Prince Harry took the stand again Tuesday in his landmark phone hacking lawsuit against British media company, Mirror Group.
Harry alleges that the company, MGN, used illegal methods, including phone hacking, to obtain information that they then printed in tabloids.
As he took the stand, Harry spoke in measured and dignified tones about his experiences, even opening up briefly about the rumors that King Charles is not his father.
Rumors have plagued the ginger royal his whole life, after his mom Princess Diana admitted to having an affair with James Hewitt.
Harry spoke about the rumors in his memoir, “Spare,” writing, “There was even talk that some reporters were seeking my DNA to prove it—my first intimation that, after tormenting my mother and sending her into hiding, they would soon be coming for me.”
One of the articles Harry is challenging is one MGN printed titled, “Plot to rob the DNA of Harry.”
Harry says that the article “reported a plot to steal a sample of my DNA to test my parentage” after Diana admitted to the affair in a 1995 interview with Martin Bashir.
Harry told the court, “Numerous newspapers had reported a rumor that my biological father was James Hewitt, a man my mother had a relationship with after I was born. At the time of this article and others similar to it, I wasn’t actually aware that my mother hadn’t met Major Hewitt until after I was born. This timeline is something I only learnt of in around 2014, although I now understand this was common knowledge amongst the defendant’s journalists.”
The royal added, “At the time, when I was 18 years old and had lost my mother just six years earlier, stories such as this felt very damaging and very real to me. They were hurtful, mean and cruel. I was always left questioning the motives behind the stories. Were the newspapers keen to put doubt into the minds of the public so I might be ousted from the Royal Family?”
Harry’s statement was a condemnation unto itself, claiming that the press assigned him a “role”; “My experience as a member of the Royal Family, each of us gets cast into a specific role by the tabloid press. You start off as a blank canvas while they work out what kind of person you are and what kind of problems and temptations you might have. They then start to edge you towards playing the role or roles that suit them best and which sells as many newspapers as possible, especially if you are the ‘spare’ to the ‘heir’. You’re then either the ‘playboy prince’, the ‘failure’, the ‘drop out’ or, in my case, the ‘thicko’, the ‘cheat’, the ‘underage drinker’, the ‘irresponsible drug taker’, the list goes on.
As destiny has it, Prince Harry was denied his childhood.
He was a young teen when Princess died, and his father was seeking hightly solace with another dame.
I hope he wins is case against the paparazzi, who headlined him, ceaselessly, as Harry Potty or Harry Rotter. Bad… pic.twitter.com/MT68HpZsIZ
— Jeff Ooi (@Jeff4Malaysia) June 7, 2023
“As a teenager and in my early twenties, I ended up feeling as though I was playing up to a lot of the headlines and stereotypes that they wanted to pin on me mainly because I thought that, if they are printing this rubbish about me and people were believing it, I may as well ‘do the crime’, so to speak.
“It was a downward spiral, whereby the tabloids would constantly try and coax me, a ‘damaged’ young man, into doing something stupid that would make a good story and sell lots of newspapers. Looking back on it now, such behavior on their part is utterly vile.”
Harry alleges that the tabloids took “pleasure” in ruining his relationships. He claims that he ”sold more newspapers” when single, and said, “Whenever I got into a relationship, they were very keen to report the details but would then, very quickly, seek to try and break it up by putting as much strain on it and creating as much distrust as humanly possible… This twisted objective is still pursued to this day even though I’m now married. At no point did I have a girlfriend or a relationship with anyone without the tabloids getting involved and ultimately trying to ruin it using whatever unlawful means at their disposal.”
Harry says that publishing “articles about me that were often wrong but interspersed with snippets of truth, which I now think were most likely gleaned from voicemail interception and/or unlawful information gathering…created an alternative and distorted version of me and my life to the general public—being those people that I had to serve and interact with as part of my role in the Royal Family—to the point where any one of the thousands of people that I met or was introduced to on any given day, could easily have gone ‘you know what, you’re an idiot. I’ve read all the stories about you and I’m now going to stab you.’”
Harry explains that he was issued a mobile phone by the Institution while he was still a minor. He never paid any mobile bills, and assumed that it was being handled by the Institution with safety in mind. An ironic assumption, the royal now muses.
And he noticed some irregularities, even then; “I wouldn’t go into my voicemail unless the little envelope symbol flashed up on my phone signaling to me that I had a new message. Sometimes this symbol would vanish before I had a chance to listen to the voicemail. I don’t know how long after they’d been listened to that the symbol vanished, presumably straight away. I also distinctly remember people saying to me ‘did you not get my voicemail?’ on both a personal and a work-related level. I was like, ‘no,’ and sometimes I would go back into my voicemail to look for it but still couldn’t find it.”
The young royal also talked about the impact of knowing that people with nefarious intentions were listening in on his private conversations, and the fallout that he’s experienced in his personal life, adding, “Unfortunately, as a consequence of me bringing my Mirror Group claim, both myself and my wife have been subjected to a barrage of horrific personal attacks and intimidation from Piers Morgan, who was the Editor of the Daily Mirror between 1995 and 2004, presumably in retaliation and in the hope that I will back down, before being able to hold him properly accountable for his unlawful activity towards both me and my mother during his editorship.”
Despite being warned off the lawsuit by his father and brother, and shunned by the London royals for disrupting the status quo, Harry feels that this lawsuit is of vital importance.
Harry explained, “Our country is judged globally by the state of our press and our government—both of which I believe are at rock bottom. Democracy fails when your press fails to scrutinize and hold the government accountable, and instead choose to get into bed with them so they can ensure the status quo. I may not have a role within the Institution but, as a member of the British Royal family, and as a soldier upholding important values, I feel there’s a responsibility to expose this criminal activity in the name of public interest. The country and the British public deserve to know the depths of what was actually happening then, and indeed now. We will be better off for it.”