Prince Harry’s bid to include claims against media mogul Rupert Murdoch and broadcaster Piers Morgan has been rejected by London’s High Court.
Harry – along with more than 40 other plaintiffs – is suing Murdoch’s U.K. newspaper business News Group Newspapers over claims of phone hacking and unlawful news gathering.
The plaintiffs had applied to amend their lawsuit to include new claims against Murdoch and Morgan, who worked for the now-defunct NGN newspaper News of the World in the mid-1990s, claiming Murdoch new about unlawful activity at his newspapers as far back as 2004. NGN has vociferously disputed this.
Now a judge has said claims against Murdoch would effectively amount to a new lawsuit and cannot be folded into the current litigation.
Prince Harry was also denied permission to include allegations dating back before 1996 and after 2011 (the period for which many of the phone hacking claims have already been dealt with in either criminal or civil courts).
According to Reuters, Harry wanted to widen the timespan of his suit to include articles about his mother, Princess Diana, published in the mid-1990s as well as those from 2016 when he began dating his now-wife Meghan Markle. Harry has claimed NGN newspaper The Sun hired private investigators to target Meghan.
Judge Fancourt, who is presiding over the case, did allow Harry to make some amendments to his claims, however, including adding allegations about bugging and accusations against more individuals.
“At a hearing in March 2024, the Claimants sought to introduce wide ranging allegations into their pleadings,” a rep for NGN said following the judgment. “NGN argued that a number of these were irrelevant to the fair and just determination of claims and had nothing to do with seeking compensation for victims of phone hacking or unlawful information gathering.”
“The Court in its judgment today has thoroughly vindicated NGN’s position and did not give permission to introduce large and significant portions of the amendments.”
Reps for Prince Harry didn’t respond by press time.
The case is scheduled to go to trial in Jan. 2025.
Source Agencies
