Prince Harry has followed in his wife Meghan Markle’s footsteps by winning his legal claim against British tabloid the Mail on Sunday.
The prince, who is also known by his title the Duke of Sussex, filed a claim against the newspaper over a series of articles which he claimed caused “serious damage to his reputation and substantial hurt, embarrassment and distress which is continuing.”
A judge has today ruled the Mail on Sunday’s articles about Harry were indeed defamatory.
Harry launched the lawsuit in February of this year after the Mail on Sunday reported on another legal claim he is pursuing against the British government.
In his case against the U.K.’s Home Office, Harry is seeking a judicial review in order to force the government to provide official security for himself and his family, including Archie and Lilibet, his two young children with Markle. The Sussexes have indicated they will pay for the security themselves but wish for it to be provided via the Home Office. However there are fears this could cause a situation in which the U.K. government becomes responsible for providing private security for any visiting celebrity, even if that celebrity is willing to pay for it.
Harry claims that when the Mail on Sunday reported on his case against the Home Office, they implied his offer to pay for the security himself wasn’t true.
The articles “manipulate[d] and confuse[d] public opinion” against Harry, his lawsuit claims, especially in their reference to “spin doctors” (a British slang term for publicists, particularly in the political sphere). The articles suggested that Harry had authorized the “spin doctors” to “put out false and misleading statements about his willingness to pay for police protection,” he said in his lawsuit.
The suggestions in the articles were “self-evidently exceptionally serious and damaging,” the lawsuit continued, constituting “an attack on his honesty and integrity and undermine his fitness to be involved both in charitable and philanthropic work in general, and in efforts to tackle online misinformation in particular (through the Archewell Foundation).”
He has requested aggravated damages for libel, an injunction barring the Mail on Sunday from re-publishing the claims and an order to compel the Mail on Sunday to publish its judgment.
Last December Harry’s wife Meghan won her own case – for invasion of privacy and copyright infringement – against the Mail on Sunday after the newspaper published a newspaper she wrote to her father Thomas Markle.
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