Prince Harry Gets Emotional in Court

0:01Prince Harry gives evidence against the Daily Mail. Meghan Markle's popularity hits an all-time Tim Lowe in Britain and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's daughter will not speak to him. I'm Jack Royston, Newsweek's Chief Royal Correspondent, and this is Newsweek's Royal Report. Hello listeners and welcome to the show. Prince Harry has begun testifying at the High Court in the phone hacking and illegal practices lawsuit that he's brought against Associated Newspapers Limited, which is the publisher of the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday. also the mail online, but they're less involved in this case.

0:36So just a little bit of background. What Harry's basically saying happened is that between 2001 and 2013, they did all of these stories about his private life. And he says 14 of them, he believes were obtained using an equal means. In some cases, it's phone hacking, as in intercepting voicemails. Other cases, he accuses them of tapping into his conversations, his actual live telephone calls. And then another it's thing is what in Britain is known as blagging, which is where you try to basically get something you're not entitled to by faking something. So in the case of journalists, it's usually calling up and, you know, maybe blagging someone's flight records by pretending to be them.

1:16But it also has a much more casual meaning. But it's been a really fascinating day of evidence. And Harry has got into some quite testing exchanges with the Daily Mail's barrister, this guy, Anthony White, Casey, where actually the judge has had to step in a few times and kind of say to Harry that you don't need to fight the case, like don't take the burden on of trying to fight this case. You don't need to effectively be argumentative with the barrister who's cross examining you. But it is easy to see why the stakes are so high for Harry, because this is, Anthony White is the same attorney who represented the mail on Sunday in a lawsuit brought by Meghan.

1:55and Megan was suing over a private letter she sent her father. And in the early stages of the case, there was this big argument in court about whether five of Megan's friends should be named. These were five people who had given anonymous interviews to People magazine. Megan said they shouldn't be. The Daily Mail on Sunday said they could be. And around that time, in July 2020, Megan experienced a miscarriage. Now, I should say, before I go any further, that the medical science position on stress and miscarriage is that there's no proven case, there's no proven evidential argument to show that stress causes miscarriage.

2:34And I think it's really important to make that quite emphatically because the last thing that I would want is for women to go out and blame themselves or blame the other people in their lives for losing pregnancies. You know, it is not something that medical science backs or believes. What medical science says is that most miscarriages are a product of chromosome or abnormalities. But Harry says he believes that the male caused the miscarriage, caused Meghan to lose a baby. So I'll read in a minute a little bit more of what he actually said. This was during his Netflix special. But in the meantime, let's talk a little bit about what's been happening in court.

3:10So that gives you an idea of some of the emotional stakes that hang over this whole case. But also the actual subject matter that's been discussed in court is hugely emotional too. I mean, it's all about Harry kind of accusing the male of destroying his past relationships. Several ex-girlfriends actually are named. Chelsea Davey, we were expecting to be at the center of this court case. She's an ex-girlfriend from years and years ago. Probably the first real, like, proper love of his life. The other, you know, two of the other girlfriends mentioned were much smaller, much shorter relationships.

3:45But Harry seems to, he really does seem to feel the emotions quite strongly in relation to all of them. um so let's talk a little bit about it so it was actually it was kind of a really weird start to the whole thing it was a kind of a false start so harry walked in he arrived at court just uh just a little bit before things were due to start um and then he got sworn in he sat down he was ready to go with the evidence and they had to kind of pause the whole thing because there were technical problems with the audio um and there was then like an odd exchange with his barrister about what he should be referred to as david sherborne suggested you know do you want to be your royal Highness followed by Sir, which is the classic royal protocol, basically.

4:25And he said, in the end, they decided on Prince Harry. And then the first thing, Anthony White, the male barrister, male attorney, the very first thing he said to Harry was basically, you know, all of these stories that you've complained of, 14 stories, when they were published at the time, you didn't say anything, you didn't complain about them. And Harry actually said right from the word go, he kind of battered that ball back into the palace's court. So he said, I wouldn't have been allowed to complain about them anyway, because of the institution. It was never complain, never explain policy.

4:57So that's quite interesting. You know, the the mail's lawyer has sought to challenge that and say there were actually times when Harry had conversations directly with one of the journalists mentioned in the trial, Rebecca English, the current Daily Mail royal editor. And Harry has acknowledged that, yes, he did. He did actually speak to her directly at points. So we'll see what the judge thinks about all of that. But then there's this question about the past relationships. So one of the first ones discussed, Natalie Pinkham, she's a sports journalist and presenter. And Harry has said basically the male destroyed his relationship with her.

5:31And quite interestingly, Harry was on the phone with her last night and he made like last minute alterations to his witness statement. It's all been like way more dramatic than any of these other court cases that Harry's thoughts have been. So he said, you know, it is disturbing to feel that my every move, thought or feeling was being tracked and monitored just for the mail to make money out of it. And that knowing the false information was added to their stories in order to put me off the scent. In fact, my relationship with Natalie broke down precisely because of the distrust. And it led to me not speaking to her for years.

6:02It seemed as though someone was leaking these stories, but I now believe that it will have come from listening on our communications, voicemail interception, and or blagging. So this particular period with Natalie Pinkham was in 2002. So Harry was actually really young at that time. He must have been a teenager, I think, still. He was born in 1984, as I recall. So the male's legal team actually argued that the journalist who wrote those stories for man on Sunday, Katie Nichol, was kind of friends with Natalie Pinkham, spoke to her on the phone, and there is, in fact, a tape recording of one of the conversations that Katie Nichol had with Natalie Pinkham.

6:44But Harry, he really came out fighting, particularly on this issue. And he said to Anthony White, they were not friends. She, as in Katie Nichol, used to ring her up to ask about stories. It doesn't mean they are good friends. I spoke to her last night. And Harry made this point in a couple of different ways several times. And he really came out of the blocks fighting everything Anthony White said to him. He was snapping back. He was saying things like, you would say that, you know, stuff that was along the lines of, I suppose, trying to put Anthony White on the back foot. But, you know, it led to the judge, Mr.

7:22Justice Nicklin, stepping in and basically saying to Harry, effectively, you don't need to do this. Like, you can chill out, calm down, you just need to answer the questions. And so this is what he said. This is a big moment. And sometimes you're doing what lots of litigants do in litigations, which is that you try to answer back against the barrister. A barrister for American listeners is basically, it's an attorney, but it's an attorney who specifically argues the case in court. So you have one type of lawyer called a solicitor, they prepare the case in the background, the barrister argues the case in court before the judge.

7:54You're trying to answer back against the barrister about what he has put to you. You don't have to bear the burden of answering the case today. So the judge made this point again several times in a couple of different ways, using a couple of different forms of words, but all amounting to the same thing, which is to just try to get Harry to just calm it down a little bit because it was a very testy, explosive atmosphere. And it really wasn't like that when Harry gave evidence in his previous case against Mirror Group newspapers. And in that case, there were a couple of moments that were maybe slightly awkward or embarrassing for Harry because, you know, he was told by the lawyer, well, look, you know, you're saying this must have come from an illegal practice, but actually we found that same piece of information in a story printed earlier by another newspaper, so it was probably just lifted from that.

8:41And we've had a little bit of that kind of argument today, but I think it's really telling that emotions are much higher and the atmosphere is much more febrile. And I think, you know, it's very easy in Harry's case to understand why, because Harry made this claim that the male caused Meghan to lose a pregnancy. So I'm going to pause discussing about the live events in court to just talk a little bit about that. But there is lots more to discuss from the case, including, you know, Harry accusing the male of listening in on a phone call between him and Prince William about their feelings about a publication printing pictures of their mother, Princess Diana, dying.

9:22So obviously that is hugely significant. I don't want to get too lost in talking about other things when that's coming down the line, because that's a massive detail that needs to be discussed properly. But let's talk a little bit about that. So, I mean, Megan wrote the story. It was a letter, rather, to her father, Thomas Markle. I sent it off to him. He sat on it for a while. It was all about the disintegration of their relationship around Meghan and Harry's wedding because he'd staged some photos for the paparazzi. So then five of Meghan's friends gave these interviews to People magazine, and one of them mentioned this letter.

9:58After that happened, Thomas Markle gave the letter to the Mail on Sunday, and the Mail on Sunday printed huge extracts from it, arguing they had the right to do this because Megan's friends had already removed the privacy attached to the letter by discussing it with people. So Megan ultimately won that case, but it was really, really emotionally traumatic for her. And one point in that journey was July 2020, when this debate was being thrashed out in court about whether these five friends who spoke to people were going to be named or not. And Megan really felt that their lives would be torn to pieces if they would be.

10:35And it was in that context. It was at that time, while that was all rumbling on, that Meghan lost pregnancy. So what did Harry, in fact, have to say about that? Well, he spoke about it during Harry and Meghan, the docuseries that they did. It was their first big Netflix project. It came out in December 2022. And Harry said, I believe my wife suffered a miscarriage because of what the male did. I watched the whole thing. Now, do we absolutely know that the miscarriage was created caused by that? Of course we don't. But bearing in mind the stress that that caused, the lack of sleep and the timing of the pregnancy, how many weeks in she was, I can say from what I saw that miscarriage was created by what they were trying to do to her.

11:23Now, I think it's really important to note that Meghan actually doesn't make that allegation. Harry makes it. Meghan had every opportunity to make it herself. Clearly, she chose not to. Megan said, I was pregnant. I really wasn't sleeping. The first morning when we woke up in our home, because they just moved house, is when I miscarried. So, you know, really dramatic, high stakes stuff from Harry even back then. But also there have been more tensions and wranglings between Harry and Anthony White since, because Harry's camp, or at least a source close to Harry's case, told me this morning and some other news outlets that actually there's been dirty tricks going on in the run, in the build up to Harry's evidence.

12:04And what basically happened was Anthony White, the male's lawyer, was due to give his opening speech. And indeed he did. But he came in under two hours and he had said that he would need a day and a half. So when something like that happens, the court wants to crack on. They just want to get on with the case. They don't want to waste time. So that meant Harry's evidence had to be brought forward from Thursday to Wednesday, which is why he's giving evidence today. Now, he hadn't planned to be in court Wednesday, and the legal team didn't know if he was going to be able to make it. We know that he wasn't doing any charity engagements.

12:35And, you know, to all intents and purposes, we've been, you know, the indication seems to be that there were no plans to meet Charles either. So we don't know what he had today, but it does not seem to have gone down well with Harry that this happened. So this is what my source told me. ANL, publishers of the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, Mail Online, and their legal teams have had months to inform the court that their opening arguments would last less than two hours. Instead, they have had to resort to game playing and dirty tricks consistent with the way that they have treated not just the Duke, but all of the victims in this case.

13:09They think that by pulling the schedule forward 24 hours, they're giving Prince Harry less time to prepare. He's been preparing for this moment for the last three years. Safe to say, he's ready. So basically, even from before he stepped into court, they were effectively coming out fighting. and that was exactly how it played out in the actual courtroom when Harry was in the box. He gave his evidence sitting down. He came across as activated, I would say, like nervous system activation. I don't want to call it nerves or anxiety. I think activated is probably the best way to describe it. He wasn't angry or shouting and effing and blinding, but it was testy, like everything Anthony White put to him, which was put in fairly calm tone.

13:57Anthony White actually didn't pile in on Harry, but Harry was coming back on every point and trying to take the line of questioning down new directions and fight the case, just as the judge described, basically. But I did say that I wanted to talk about some of the other material that's come out in court, and that is entirely correct. So let's discuss it. I think in some ways, one of the biggest lines from it, is that Harry has actually accused the male of listening live into a very sensitive conversation that he had with William about Diana. So he says in relation to this particular article that the male did, talking about this conversation they had and their feelings about the, basically, I think it was an Italian publication, printed pictures of Diana dying.

14:49And so this is what Harry said. I do not recall reading this article at the time, but it is really disgusting, especially with the crude headline and explicit reference to a phone call. My brother and I were relatively young at the time. I was just 21, and we're having private conversations about photographs of our dead mother, which had been put into the public domain. It was obviously a highly emotional call for William and I as to what we should do, because that was what was being discussed. They had to decide what to do about it. Could they stop the pictures or whatever, whatever. And then Harry adds, This is in his written witness statements.

15:21This isn't part of his live evidence now. And he says, if Associated was willing to publish this type of material, then it really makes me wonder how far they are prepared to go and what else they learned but never published because they would get caught. The amount of information and detail in this article would not have come from Clarence House. Clarence House represented the monarchy at the time. They were plainly listening in to calls as well as spending large sums on private investigators. so you know that is something that the mail I'm sure will fight back on very hard, Harry hasn't necessarily presented any kind of actual sort of smoking gun evidence to demonstrate that there's proof of the existence of a wiretap but what he's saying there is there's no other way this would have come out it must have been they were listening and on the call because how else would they know and obviously he's saying it was an incredibly private moment I mean, you know, the emotions were really self-evident.

16:21You might notice from my background here that I'm obviously not physically at the High Court in London. And that's because a remote access link, almost like Zoom, it's not Zoom, but almost like Zoom, has been made available to journalists. So obviously using that to watch the cases enabled me to come and do this video to talk to you, which probably wouldn't have been possible if I'd gone physically to court. But even via that link, watching via video link, it was really obvious that Harry is still feeling the emotions that he felt during this period. And he clearly does take it all extremely seriously.

16:57Another one, Harry and William put on through this kind of memorial concert for Princess Diana. And the Mail did a story about it, which Harry has also another one that Harry's complained about. And he says this article contains information about details for party being planned by me and Prince William and for after Princess Diana's memorial concert, including details about my plans and conversations. The information in this article is private, nosy and unnecessary. It would have most likely come from one of our phones. So it's really explosive stuff. I said multiple relationships were mentioned.

17:37So I'm going to very quickly, I appreciate I've been talking for quite a while already. So I'm going to try and skim over those in slightly less detail. But another one of those relationships was a woman called Laura Gerard Lee. So this was both Laura Gerard Lee and Natalie Pinkham were at points described as kind of Harry's first love. They were like really, really early relationships. and there was a story a story written about Laura in 2003 and Harry says this is a prime example of why my relationship with Laura did not last long it led to Laura's parents being doorstepped which was understandably distressing this sort of thing caused me to try and keep matters as private as I could to avoid this happening and that's been a big theme of Harry's evidence is that he's saying not only that the relationships he did have were destroyed but also that he consciously kept his circle really close and private because he was paranoid that anybody who might come into his life could be a source for a newspaper.

18:33So obviously, you know, that kind of suggests there are probably friendships that never really happened or blossomed preemptively because Harry foresaw problems down the line. But, you know, Harry, pre-Meghan, Harry's biggest relationship that didn't work was Chelsea Davey. And, you know, he was going out with Chelsea for years. And Harry has long said that that relationship was destroyed by the media. And he makes that argument again in his witness statement. And he says, one particular article revealed paranoia and agitation I felt as a result of the paparazzi attempting to take photographs of Chelsea and I abroad.

19:12The male was first to publicly disclose Chelsea's name. From that point onward, everything blew up and her life as she knew it was over. Her ability to enjoy some semblance of privacy evaporated instantly. It was a rumour, but Associated confirmed the details to the world. So, look, what does it all mean? And will Harry win? Well, Anthony White has been trying to establish this principle that the journalists involved, and the two probably the names mentioned most frequently have been Rebecca English and Katie Nicholl, had their own contacts and did speak to human sources and gathered information through entirely lawful means.

19:52And I suspect that he will have persuaded the judge that that's true. It's just about whether he has gone far enough to persuade the judge that there isn't enough evidence, that unlawful practices weren't also used. Now, I've actually been talking about this case for years, since long before this actual day of trial arrived, And I've always said that I think Harry will get something over the line, partly because he has this kind of explosive email from it was sent by a freelance journalist in South Africa to the Daily Mail saying that Chelsea Davies flight records had been obtained and included like a seat number and really specific detail.

20:32and so I think on the basis of that email I think Harry will probably get something over the line in relation to what we term blagging that they blagged Chelsea Davies flight records and Harry argues that they then used that information to hound Chelsea everywhere she went to kind of terrorise her by constantly taking photographs of her making them distrust each other making them distrust other people in their lives Harry says he actually mostly did trust Chelsea but he didn't trust her friends and so that this basically then caused the relationship to unravel. What about the rest? I mean phone hacking it's an explosive allegation.

21:14I can't say now that I've seen a kind of smoking gun that says that some particular that I could say this story was definitely phone hacking but they do seem to have got a huge amount of information including some specific details. So obviously we're going to have to see what the journalists themselves say about it. I understand they will be giving evidence. They've certainly given witness statements already. And I mean, ultimately it'll be up to the judge. But my prediction at this moment is that Harry will get something over the line, but he may not get everything. I think there's a good chance that some of his allegations will fall by the wayside.

21:51And the big question is, will he get something to do with phone hacking or live bugging of phone calls, wiretapping of phone calls over the line. And if he does, that is explosive and it will be a massive bloody nose for the mail. And also we understand that Paul Dacre, the very famous firebrand editor, former editor of the mail, will be giving evidence too. So his reputation will be on the line as well. But the one final point I'm going to make before I have to go back and start reporting on it all over again, because we've still got the afternoon session, is that this all happened a really long time ago.

22:25And it may not necessarily be fair, but the reality of how public opinion functions is that it can sometimes be quite hard to get people to care now really passionately and strongly about things that happened in the past. And when phone hacking as a concept first exploded into public domain, there was huge outrage, particularly over the inception of the voicemails of a murder victim called Millie Dowler. And that outrage, that huge outrage, wound up causing the closure of a tabloid newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch called The News of the World. I don't think that even if Harry wins this case, we're going to see that level of outrage and anger because it's just too long ago and nobody really plausibly maintains that this kind of group of illegal practices or unlawful practices are still going on in the British media today.

23:17But that doesn't change the fact that if Harry wins this case, he will feel like he has scored a massive PR victory and he'll probably feel, you know, hopefully for him, he will feel like he can put to bed some of the kind of ghosts of his past and some of his anger about this period in his life. Now, one last thing I want to mention. Keep in mind everything I said about the background with Meghan and with the miscarriage, because at the very end of Harry's evidence, He actually had a moment where he did become overcome and he kind of broke down in the witness box. Not by broke down, I don't necessarily mean sobbing.

23:52I mean that his voice cracked as he tried to get the words out. And this was actually after he'd finished being cross-examined by the male's lawyer. So I suppose the adrenaline rush of that experience had passed. And he was now being taken through what's called re-examination, which is when his own lawyer, David Sherborne, stood back up, got back on his feet. and started going over some points with Harry that he just wanted to, I suppose, emphasize or clarify with the judge. And so Harry was giving this kind of concluding mini speech almost about how damaging this whole experience had been for him emotionally.

24:27And so Harry was giving this kind of mini speech at the end where he was talking about the huge emotional toll this experience had taken on him. and he said he concluded with the words they've made my wife's life an absolute misery and yet his voice broke as he said that um so you i think you could kind of already tell that he was starting to get emotional before he tried to say those words but obviously his voice cracked as he tried to get them out so i do think that the whole history of megan's experiences with the male will have been hanging over him and hanging over this evidence in this case and so part of that is very much this issue with Meghan having miscarried the pregnancy, but it's a whole load of other stuff as well from, you know, her earliest experiences.

25:12So part of that, I think, definitely will be Meghan's experiences with this miscarriage, but it's everything else as well. Every kind of negative story the male have done about Meghan, the whole of that lawsuit Meghan filed against them, and everything that's happened since. So really strong emotions from Prince Harry in a way that it wasn't like that when he gave his evidence in the Mirror Group case that he fought before. So this, clearly, this is the grudge match. It's Harry versus the Mail. It's his most hated newspaper and emotions have been running high. The trial is actually listed for nine weeks, so I'm going to continue reporting on it.

25:47I may not have something on it every single week, because that's the nature of nine-week trials, but I will try to keep checking back in with little bits and pieces and, of course, the outcome when it comes. On that note, I'm going to take a quick break. But before I do, just a reminder to rate The Royal Report on Spotify or Apple or wherever you get your favourite podcasts. And we are, of course, now also on YouTube. So if you're watching there, then don't forget to like and subscribe.