Prince Harry: My brother knew ‘an awful lot more’ about NGN’s phone hacking
Prince Harry decided to spill a lot of tea in his pretrial filing, in his lawsuit against The Sun. The thing is, I’m pretty sure this isn’t ALL the tea. Harry still has cards left to play, clearly, and this is only the information he’s giving out as part of The Sun’s attempt to dismiss his case. As we heard yesterday, Harry apparently has documentation that his brother accepted “a very large sum of money” from The Sun in 2020, a year after Harry began suing all of the British tabloids. The fact that William accepted a large settlement is notable enough, but the fact that everything about the settlement was a secret… well, that is mind-blowing. It’s also crazy that William was secretly taking gobs of cash from Rupert Murdoch while he (and the rest of the family) assumed the public position that Harry was crazy to sue the tabloids. Anyway, the Guardian is running several pieces about Harry’s court filing, and they did a load of excerpts from Harry’s filing:
William knew more about the hacking than Harry: “Judging by Ms [Maxine] Mossman’s [a lawyer representing Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers] witness statement, my brother appeared to know an awful lot more than I did on the subject of phone hacking although he did not tell me if that was the case. However, NGN still settled his claim for a huge sum of money in 2020 without subjecting him to a similar strike-out application, without any of the public being told, and seemingly with some favourable deal in return for him going ‘quietly’ so to speak.
Proof of the secret agreement between Murdoch & the Windsors: “This goes to prove the existence of this secret agreement between the institution and senior executives at NGN – if it wasn’t in place then why on earth did William wait until 2019 to bring his claim in circumstances where our two private secretaries brought and settled claims back in 2012, and where he knew far more about the matter back then than I did, and also why didn’t NGN test its limitation argument against him?”
Charles’s intervention: “With hindsight, I now understand why staff at Clarence House [representing Charles and Camilla] were being so unhelpful and were seemingly blocking our every move, as they had a specific long-term strategy to keep the media (including NGN) onside in order to smooth the way for my stepmother (and father) to be accepted by the British public as queen consort (and king respectively) when the time came, and anything that might upset the applecart in this regard (including the suggestion of resolution of our phone hacking claims) was to be avoided at all costs…. Indeed, when I did actually issue my hacking claims against both MGN and NGN in October 2019, I was summoned to Buckingham Palace and specifically told to drop the legal actions because they have an ‘effect on all the family’. This was a direct request (or rather demand) from my father, Edward Young [private secretary to the queen] and my father’s private secretary, Clive Alderton.”
The tabloids wanted Harry to have a public breakdown: “Having seen me grow up from a baby (being born into this ‘contractual relationship’ without any choice) and scrutinised my every move, the tabloids have known the challenges and mental health struggles that I have had to deal with throughout my childhood and adult life, in large part created by them, and for them to then play on that and use it to their own advantage, while weaponising mental health, I think is truly appalling. Despite them all knowing about what I was dealing with throughout the years, they kept on doubling down their efforts rather than letting up. That is grotesque and sadistic – and no doubt they were hoping for a total and very public breakdown.”
James Murdoch, son of Rupert, is a ‘kindred spirit’: “He [James Murdoch] made a real effort to try and come and talk to me [at a Google event] despite my security detail trying to keep me away from him – presumably they thought I’d get into a heated argument with him or worse. I got the distinct impression that, having broken away from the cult that is the Murdoch dynasty, he was starting to show signs that he wanted to do things differently and to make amends for the past. Given that he had broken away from his family’s history, and I was about to do the same with mine, I felt that we were kindred spirits of sorts. My wife and I subsequently had a Zoom call with him and his wife when I was on the Aspen Commission for Digital Information. I also remember congratulating him for going in a different direction to his father …”
The James Murdoch thing is fascinating – James Mudoch is now LA-based and he left his father’s business several years ago. James even publicly excoriated Donald Trump AND hosted a fundraiser for Joe Biden. Is James… helping Prince Harry’s case? That would be treason in the Murdoch family, and I’m doubtful James would go that far. But it’s fascinating that Harry used James’s name in this filing. Harry is also unafraid to name Edward Young and Clive Alderton as two of the senior courtiers heavily leaning on Harry to end his legal pursuits against the tabloids. What a magnificent coronation gift!
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