Prince Harry, Elton John & More Lose Privacy Lawsuit

Prince Harry's Rep Reacts After Offer to Stay at Buckingham Palace Is “Withdrawn at the Last Moment"

Prince Harry, Elton John and more stars are dealing with the aftermath of a lost legal battle.

On July 7, British Justice Matthew Nicklin ruled against a group of high profile figures—that also included Elizabeth Hurley—in a lawsuit accusing the Associated Newspapers, the publisher of the Daily Mail, of unlawful information gathering.

“Associated Newspapers welcomes today’s judgement, which is an overwhelming victory for the Daily Mail and its journalists, and for a free press generally,” a spokesperson for Associated Newspapers said in a July 7 statement to E! News. “This is a magnificent vindication of the Daily Mail’s journalism.”

In the lawsuit, filed in 2022, the plaintiffs accused the newspaper organization of mobile phone hacking, landline bugging and even home bugging in 97 separate allegations. Following the ruling, Associated Newspapers applauded Judge Nicklin for how his ruling “accepted the honesty of our journalists’ evidence on how they sourced their stories.”

The publisher went on to reiterate, as they did in response to the initial filing, that the since-dismissed allegations were “lurid” and “preposterous,” adding the claims “were a fishing expedition by the claimants and their legal teams in a politically motivated campaign to muzzle the free press.”

“The reputations of our decent and hard-working journalists were terribly impugned, and today they have been exonerated,” the publisher continued in a statement. “As the judgement clearly shows, every single article was legitimately sourced.”

And Associated Publishers added gratitude for the judge’s ruling, and “for the patience and wisdom he has displayed throughout this misguided legal action, which has wasted so much valuable court time and more than £50m in legal costs.”

E! News has reached out to reps for Prince Harry, John and Hurley but has not yet heard back.

At the start of the trial in January, Harry—who previously filed two lawsuits against other newspaper publishers, one of which he won and the other that was settled—delivered an emotional testimony detailing the hardship caused by the Daily Mail’s alleged phone hacking, calling it a “horrible experience.”

Photo by Jonathan Brady - Pool/Getty Images

“They continue coming after me,” he said in a January court appearance, “They have made my wife’s life an absolute misery.”

And while Harry—dad to Prince Archie, 7, and Princess Lilibet, 5, with wife Meghan Markle—noted he understood the microscope his life would be under in watching his mother Princess Diana struggle with a similar hardship, he argued he faced an unprecedented amount of monitoring.

“Whenever I got on a plane, or in a car, I always expected I was being followed,” he said during his testimony. “I was under 24-hour surveillance.”

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