Prince Harry complains to High Court in London about ‘awful’ time in Australia
The Duke of Sussex alleges he was hounded by private investigators who may have been paid to watch him during his gap year in Australia.
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Prince Harry has complained to the High Court in London about two articles relating to his “suffocating” time on his gap year in Australia in 2003 where he alleges private investigators may have been paid to watch his movements.
The royal told how tabloid photographers hounded him to a remote beach on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast as well as a farm in the outback, making his visit so “awful” that the late Queen had to intervene and sent an aide to help.
In his case accusing Mirror Group Newspapers of phone hacking and of illegally obtaining information about his private life, Prince Harry told of two articles relating to his time in Australia in 2003 when he was papped with friends near Noosa at the age of 19.
“It was a public beach, but not busy or popular so I’m unclear how anyone had known we were there, to be in the right place at the right time to take photographs,” the royal said in an emotional 55-page witness statement.
“I wasn’t aware of anyone taking photographs at the time,’’ Prince Harry wrote.
The other article about Australia was published two months earlier on September 27, 2003 and written by Mirror royal reporter Jane Kerr.
Headlined “Harry is ready to quit Oz”, Prince Harry said the article was “so awful” because it showed there was “nowhere in the world, not even the Australian outback, where I wouldn’t be hounded by the press or paparazzi”.
Prince Harry wrote: “(It) reports that I was considering leaving Australia, where I was on a gap year, because of the level of press intrusion I was experiencing.
“The article includes a comment from a Palace spokesperson expressing concern and disappointment about the treatment I was experiencing.
“I do recall that the Palace issued a statement because the situation in Australia was awful for me and there was supposed to be an agreement that once I had done the press call on arrival, I would be left to get on with my gap year in private.”
He added: “The most interesting part of this article for me is the line that I was staying inside ‘watching videos’ instead of working outside to avoid the camera crews.
“I’m not sure how they knew what I was doing inside, the whole purpose of me avoiding the cameras was to avoid everyone knowing what I was doing at all times.
“It was suffocating. I was only in Australia with a couple of UK bodyguards, so this is the kind of thing I would have moaned about over the phone and in voicemails.”
The Prince told MGN lawyer Andrew Green that the late Queen intervened and dispatched a senior aide to Australia to monitor press intrusion and that the “invasive” articles about his life left him feeling paranoid.
Prince Harry told the court that finding him in Noosa would have been like “trying to find a needle in a haystack” but the paparazzi tracked him down.
“My grandma had sent senior staff down because of the intrusion into my life,” the Duke said.
“I only learnt recently that the Queen had asked one of her Assistant Private Secretaries to fly out to Noosa and take a house down the road from where I was staying, without me knowing,” he wrote in his statement.
Prince Harry told the High Court there were allegedly two contribution payment requests to a private investigator, which he said seemed likely to relate to the articles.
“The first dated 24 September for £100 with the description ‘So that’s where you got your hair style from Harry’ and the second dated 26 September for £450 with the description ‘Prince Harry watch Hunter Valley (Ellis)’.
“These suggest to me that Mirror Newspaper Group were using unlawful techniques to gather information about me, with the second payment seeming to me like the defendant was paying to have me watched,” he told the court.
The Duke said that reporter Jane Kerr had submitted a witness statement whereby in most cases she says can neither recall the story nor its source.
“Their (journalist’s) cowardice speaks volumes, and I don’t understand how they are allowed to hide,” Prince Harry wrote in his statement.
“One of the reasons why I’m bringing this claim is to hold people to account for what they have done, so that they can’t hide behind their own institution or organisation.
“As I am subjecting myself to the court process, I fully expect the journalists in question to also come along and explain how they wrote these stories because, on the one hand, Mirror Group Newspapers admit that phone hacking and other unlawful information gathering went on but, on the other, they deny liability for every claim that’s been brought against them including my own,” he wrote.
“They admit people were doing it but deny the victims’ claims. Their position makes no sense and I am determined to get to the bottom of it once and for all.”
Under cross-examination, the Duke accepted that a St James’s Palace spokesperson had issued a statement about his Australian activities and the information was repeated in other nationals.
Asked whether he accepted the information was obtained by the Daily Mirror through phone hacking or other unlawful means, Prince Harry replied: “You’d have to ask the journalists”.
“I don’t accept the information came from Mark Dyer (palace aide),” he told the court.
Prince Harry will face a further questioning by the Mirror Group on Wednesday.
PRINCE HARRY ON JAMES HEWITT
The Duke of Sussex also told the court that he spent years believing the “numerous” rumours that James Hewitt, the Army Major who famously had an affair with his late mother Princess Diana, was his biological father.
He only learnt in 2014 that his mother met Mr Hewitt after he was born, the High Court in London heard.
The Duke of Sussex took to the witness stand on Tuesday to accuse Mirror Group Newspapers of phone hacking and illegal intrusion into his private life.
Agreeing to be referred to as Prince Harry rather than His Royal Highness, the Prince made history with his testimony, becoming the first senior member of the royal family in more than 130 years to give evidence from the witness box.
In addition to his testimony, Prince Harry’s written witness statement was also released, in which he addressed longstanding speculation that he was the biological son of Princess Diana and Major Hewitt, not King Charles III.
Prince Harry said he spent years believing the “numerous” stories in the British tabloid press.
“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,” he wrote.
“I spent years questioning and believing if it was true. It was only later I learned they (Princess Diana and Mr Hewitt) met after I was born.”
In the statement, Prince Harry referenced a December 2002 article published by The People.
Prince Harry accused the article’s writer, Dean Rousewell, of having a long history of using “unlawful information gathering techniques” and claimed that, for this particular story, the journalist wrote about a “plot” to steal the Duke’s hair to test his “parentage.”
The Duke claimed that Mr Rousewell pursued this story allegedly already knowing that it was not possible for Major Hewitt to be his father because of the timeline of the former cavalry officer’s relationship with Princess Diana.
“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,” Prince Harry wrote.
“The timeline is something I only learnt of in around 2014, although I now understand this was common knowledge among the defendants’ journalists.”
“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?”
Under cross examination, Prince Harry said the ‘No Eton trifles for Harry, 18’ published by the Sunday Mirror in September 2002 detailing birthday plans “was connected to an invoice” and that “the timing was suspicious.”
The claim was rebutted by Mr Green, who is described as “a fearless and fearsome cross-examiner”, saying it was based on an interview the royal gave to the Press Association two days before publication.
Mr Green also argued there was no proof of hacking in The People article, titled ‘Matured Harry is a godfather’ (April 20 2003), is about his invitation to be the godfather of his former nanny’s child. It was published a week prior in the Sunday Telegraph, he said.
The court hearing is not the first time the Duke has spoken publicly about the rumour that Hewitt is his father, however.
Earlier this year, Prince Harry wrote in his memoir, Spare, that King Charles once made “sadistic” jokes about the gossip fodder.
“Pa liked telling stories, and this was one of the best in his repertoire,” the prince wrote in his book. “He’d always end with a burst of philosophising … Who knows if I’m really the Prince of Wales? Who knows if I’m even your real father?”
Prince Harry continued: “He’d laugh and laugh, though it was a remarkably unfunny joke, given the rumour circulating just then that my actual father was one of Mummy’s former lovers: Major James Hewitt. One cause of this rumour was Major Hewitt’s flaming ginger hair, but another cause was sadism.”
Hewitt has addressed the speculation in the past.
In 2017, Princess Diana’s ex denied that he is Prince Harry’s dad, firmly telling an Australian TV show when asked about the rumour, “No, I’m not.”
CAUSE OF ROYAL BROTHERS’ RIFT REVEALED
A December 2003 article in The People which reported a disagreement between him and Prince William about whether to meet their mother’s former butler Paul Burrell to stop him “selling” family secrets marked the starting point of the rift between the princes and is blamed for ripping the royal family apart.
“This kind of article seeds distrust between brothers,” the Duke told the court.
“Those were the words that I used and I certainly left voicemails on my brother’s phone [using that phrase],” the Duke says, of the story’s headline that he called Burrell “a two-faced s—”.
PRINCE HARRY REACTS TO PIERS MORGAN’S ‘DISTRESSING’ ATTACKS
Prince Harry accused Piers Morgan of unlawful activity towards him and his mother while he edited the Daily Mirror between 1995 and 2004.
In his statement, Harry attacked Mr Morgan who left Good Morning Britain for saying he did not believe claims made by the Duchess of Sussex during her and Harry’s explosive Oprah Winfrey interview saying he and his wife have been intimated since launching legal proceedings against the publisher.
“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, presumably in retaliation and 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.”
Under cross examination over an article entitled ‘Harry’s sick with kissing disease’ (March 29. 2002), in which the Daily Mirror said he had glandular fever, Mr Green said a St James’s Palace spokeswoman is quoted in the article confirming Harry’s condition.
“This again was in reaction to a phone call from a journalist … based on the wording that’s used here,” the Duke interjects.
“The Palace does not have a systemic habit of talking of private matters, in fact their job is quite the opposite,” he said.
“Public statements are only reserved for major events,” he said insisting the Mirror article about glandular fever was “highly personal and distressing”.
PRINCE HARRY’S PAST DRUG USE AT ISSUE
In the US, a conservative think tank has urged a federal judge to order the release of the immigration records of Prince Harry, who was awarded a visa despite the admission in his memoir that he had used illegal drugs.
Lawyers for the Washington-based Heritage Foundation are seeking the release of the records from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
“This is obviously a case about Prince Harry,” Samuel Dewey, a lawyer for the Heritage Foundation, said at the hearing. “But it’s truly about DHS and its compliance to the law.”
In the complaint being heard in US District Court, the Heritage Foundation noted that Harry “has publicly admitted to the essential elements of a number of drug offences in both the United States and abroad.”
“United States law generally renders such a person inadmissable for entry to the United States,” the complaint says.
In arguing for the release of Harry’s immigration file, the Heritage Foundation said there is “widespread public and press interest” in the case.
In its response, the government said that while there “may be some public interest in the records sought,” it is not presently convinced there is a compelling need to release the records.
Two branches of the DHS have previously declined to release the Prince’s immigration file without his consent.
Visa applicants to the United States are asked about their past drug use and can be barred from entry, although there are exceptions and waivers can be granted.
Judge Carl Nichols gave the DHS until June 13 to come up with a response to the records request.
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