Prince Harry points to her legal battles with British tabloids as a “centerpiece” that destroyed her relationship with her family.
The Duke of Sussex, 39, shared the idea as part of an ITV documentary titled Tabloids on trialwhich is scheduled to air on Thursday in the UK. The documentary centers on Harry’s legal battle against Mirror Group Newspapers. Harry solved your hacking case against Mirror Group Newspapers in February.
“That’s definitely a centerpiece,” Harry explains (via Variety) in the doc about her determination to fight the tabloids in court, leading to a family rift. “But, you know, that’s a tough question to answer because anything I say about my family results in a torrent of abuse from the press… I’ve made it very clear that this is something that needs to be done. It would be nice if we, you know, did this as a family. I believe that, again, from a service standpoint and when you’re in a public role, these are the things that we should be doing for the greater good. But, you know, I’m doing this for my reasons.”
He added: “I think everything that’s happened has shown people what the truth of the matter is. For me, the mission continues, but it has, it has. It has, as you say, caused part of a rift.”
Harry, along with his wife, Meghan Markle, they turned away from their royal duties in 2020. More than four years later, that rift is alive and well, particularly when it comes to Harry’s relationship, or lack thereof, with his brother, Prince William, about whom royal expert Katie Nicholl said in October 2022 that he was not able to forgive Harry.
Although Harry has settled his phone hacking case with Mirror Group Newspapers (a deal that included MGN forking out $505,000), his fight is far from over. Harry and other claimants are ready to go to trial with News Group Newspapersthe editor of The sunin January 2025, over allegations of illegal information gathering. In that case, Harry came under fire after a lawyer for The sun accused him of “deliberately“destroying messages he exchanged with the ghostwriter of his 2023 memoirs, Save.
Elsewhere in the documentary, Harry claims that his late mother, Princess Diana, was “probably one of the first people to be hacked.”
“And even today, the press, the tabloid press, really likes to portray her as paranoid,” said Harry, whose family ongoing fight for privacy dates back decades and decades. “But she wasn’t paranoid, she was absolutely certain about what was happening to her. And she’s not around to find out the truth.”
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