London — Britain’s Prince Harry has settled his lawsuit against the U.K. newspaper group owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, News Group Newspapers, his lawyer told CBS News.
The 2019 lawsuit brought by Harry, along with a former senior U.K. lawmaker, saw them sue News Group over alleged unlawful activities carried out by both tabloid journalists and private investigators employed by its newspapers, the Sun, and the no-longer-in-circulation News of the World. It is one of a number of lawsuits Harry has brought against newspapers in Britain.
On Tuesday, Emma Jones, a board member of the advocacy group Hacked Off, which has been working with Harry on his lawsuit, said proceedings had been scheduled to resume that morning, but that both sides appealed for extra time as the settlement talks were underway.
Jones said a “huge amount of money is going to be passing hands,” but she said she did not know the exact amount.
She said Harry also wanted “some sort of admission… that implicates NGN (News Group). An admission, in a way, of what went on,” Jones said.
“He doesn’t want to just walk away from this with an apology. He wants something tangible that he can say well, you know, ‘I at least have this. I proved my point,'” Jones said as negotiations continued Tuesday.
News Group has faced numerous lawsuits over allegations of phone hacking and illegal information gathering, and it has settled more that 1,300 involving politicians and celebrities. It has always denied, however, that the Sun newspaper was involved in any illegal activities, or that senior figures were aware of anything illegal and tried to cover it up.
Harry had previously said he wanted to go to trial to get to the truth, rather than to get a payout, after other claimants settled out of court.
In court documents that emerged in 2023, Prince Harry claimed that his own brother, heir to the British throne Prince William, quietly received “a very large sum of money” in a 2020 phone hacking settlement with Murdoch’s U.K. newspaper group.
