Prince Harry was dealt a massive blow in his years-long crusade against the British press earlier this week – and he may be on the hook to foot the very hefty bill.
The Legal Battle
As reported on Wednesday’s AM Update, Harry suffered a major defeat in his ongoing legal battle against the U.K. media when a judge dismissed every claim brought by him and six other prominent figures against Associated Newspapers, publisher of The Daily Mail and Mail On Sunday.
The group accused the publishing house of gathering private information through illegal methods, including phone hacking, intercepted voicemails, and investigators allegedly using deception to obtain confidential records. The publisher denied the accusations, maintaining its reporters relied on legitimate sources.
For Prince Harry, the verdict marked a bruising conclusion to the last major case in a legal campaign he launched against several British newspaper groups beginning in 2019. He prevailed in a lawsuit against Mirror Group Newspapers (publishers of The Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, and Sunday People) and reached an eleventh-hour settlement in January 2025 with News Group Newspapers (publishers of The Sun and the now-defunct News of the World).
In this final suit against Associated Newspapers, the former royal claimed 14 articles published between 2001 and 2013 included unlawfully obtained information. He brought the case alongside Elton John and his husband, David Furnish, actresses Elizabeth Hurley and Sadie Frost, former lawmaker Simon Hughes, and Baroness Doreen Lawrence.
The central issue was not proving the stories contained private information but rather that The Daily Mail obtained that information illegally. The judge concluded, however, that Harry failed to prove unlawful conduct in a single one of those stories and dismissed the claims made by him and the other plaintiffs.
Associated Newspapers celebrated the ruling. “The reputations of our decent and hard-working journalists were terribly impugned, and today they have been exonerated,” the publisher said in a statement.
Harry and another member of the lawsuit, meanwhile, responded with fury, calling the decision a “complete and obvious whitewash.”
Money Troubles
Despite the ruling, the legal fight is not quite over. Attention now turns to the enormous cost of the case – which some estimates put at around £50 million pounds or $67 million – and how much of that bill could fall on Harry and the other claimants.
The Telegraph’s deputy royal editor Victoria Ward reported they will likely be on the hook for much of it. “They all had some kind of special insurance, right, that covered them to a certain extent. But whether it goes to this extent, we’re yet to find out,” she explained on The Daily T podcast earlier this week.
“There’s a cost hearing that’s already been scheduled for July the 29 and 30, where these issues are going to be thrashed out,” she continued. “But at a… cost hearing last year, the judge specifically warned that this case could spiral out of control, and he expressed some concern about the seven claimants and wanted to know whether they fully understood the risks because he was concerned they weren’t fully abreast of exactly the financial cost and the implications if they lost.”
Megyn’s Take
It sounds like Prince Harry is going to need another Netflix deal, which might explain why he is making a highly publicized visit to his homeland with his wife and kids this week. On Wednesday, Megyn joined Paul Murray on Sky News Australia to react to the judgement and the possibility of Harry owing millions. Below is her take, edited for length and clarity.
“It’s yet another instance of Harry playing the fake victim. He has been railing about this case for years now. He thinks of himself as some sort of an avenger of speech issues where he is going to punish the ones who tell lies or use surreptitious means in journalism to obtain facts about poor, embattled public figures like Harry and Meghan [Markle] and really thought he’d be truth to power…
These two sue every journalist, it seems, who writes something negative about them. We’re constantly reading about their latest lawsuit. And this one, he was completely wrong. The Daily Mail, to its credit, put on a bunch of journalists – the ones who had been accused of using illicit means as a way of getting stories on Harry and others – and all the journalists said, ‘Tell me what you’re accusing me of.’ ‘No, that’s not how I got that story at all. This is how I got that story.’
As much as a journalist doesn’t like to give up his or her source, exposing the means by which you amassed your information was necessary here because they were being accused of essentially breaking the law.
[Harry’s] got a sick sense of paranoia. I am sorry that his mother [Princess Diana] died in the way she did when he was a young boy. Really, you should be joining Mothers Against Drunk Driving, if you’re upset over that… His mother was killed by a drunk driver, not by the paparazzi. She was followed by the paparazzi all the time. She knew that. She coaxed the paparazzi into following her and taking her picture all the time… She knew how to work them just as well as anyone.
So, this whole narrative about how she’s just completely been piled on and poor Harry’s been now fighting to stop it from happening to Meghan; that is why he has got to do these press fights – it’s a lie. It was a lie from the first acorn all the way now through to the big tree that he continues to nourish. And I think it’s wonderful that The Daily Mail fought back and that he has been humiliated.
And if he has to pay some massive legal fees as a result of being wrong – because over there in the U.K. it is loser pays, unlike here in America where generally everybody takes their own and walks away – good. Maybe that will really teach him a lesson. You had the opportunity to prove your case, and you failed to do so. That is how the legal system works.
He has never seen a situation in which he is not the victim and he enjoys being the victim… It’s ridiculous how they lie to us…
Given the fact that he was raised a royal… that is involuntary fame. That was not his doing. But he had his opportunity with ‘Megxit.’ This was the big opportunity to leave the Royal Family, leave the titles behind, if you really don’t want this anymore. Go live in Canada or Montecito… but actually become a private citizen…
Do your charity work quietly and without the constant need for the spotlight. Stop with your wife’s disaster tourism, showing up at the scene where children have been murdered and putting yourself on camera. The constant need to be in front of the lens in a way that will eventually pay dividends for them through their ‘As Ever’ line of jam or their next Netflix or Spotify deal, they work the press the same as Princess Diana did and they just don’t want the downsides of it…
There are upsides and there are downsides [to being a public figure]. If you have something to promote, you can probably get easily booked. If you write a book, people will probably want to talk to you about it… That is a true blessing. The downside is if they want to write about how crappy you look, or you’re aging poorly, or you’re just not a likable person, they can. And you have to take your licks like a professional.
That is the lesson these two have never learned. It is none of your business what other people think of you. Take your licks like a grown-up and go on living your beautiful life. If you bitch and whine and sue about it all the time, people hate you and the press that buys ink by the barrel is only more incentivized to loathe you and to feed the people who loathe you with more negative stories.
It is just the reality of being a public figure. You’ve got to take it like a grown-up. Stop suing people who have an endless supply of time and anger toward you. And when you get a lesson from a judge, take it humbly, quietly, and move on.”