Media law expert Ursula Smartt says News Group Newspapers settling out of court has been a “common theme” since the U.K. phone hacking scandal started.
LONDON — When Prince Harry filed his phone hacking lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch’s British-based tabloid newspaper operation, he said he was seeking accountability.
On Wednesday the British royal received a small measure of that when he reached a settlement with the newspaper chain before the High Court trial got underway.
The owner of The Sun daily newspaper and the defunct News Of The World offered a “full and unequivocal apology” to the Duke of Sussex for “serious intrusion” into his private life from 1996 to 2011. The publisher agreed to pay him “substantial damages” after admitting private investigators used “unlawful activities” to obtain “private information.”
News Group Newspapers also expressed regret for intruding into the private life of his late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales.
Ursula Smartt, an associate professor of law at Northeastern University in London, says the very nature of privacy-related trials in the U.K.’s civil courts lends themselves to financial settlements.
“Harry clearly knew he was in the right — he, Prince William and of course their mother were hacked by private investigators,” says the media law expert.
But the settlement did not come as a surprise, Smartt says, because “the minute that the lawyers touch the door handle of the High Court, the claimant or applicant has to be really, really sure.
“Otherwise,” she continues, “the lawyers will start talking. Very rarely now do you actually see civil actions going through. They settle out of court instead.”
There can be financial pressure for claimants to settle. In U.K. civil law, even if a claimant wins a case, they could end up paying their opponent’s full legal costs if the damages awarded by a judge amounts to less than what they were offered by the defendant to settle. Actor Hugh Grant bemoaned this when settling his privacy case against The Sun’s publisher last year.
In Harry’s case, there was also no guarantee he would have won, meaning he could have been forced to pay the legal bills of both sides.
Reports suggest that Murdoch’s news outfit will pay the legal fees — totaling £10 million ($12.3 million) — racked up by Harry and Tom Watson, a former deputy leader of the Labour Party who was also suing the news group.
Smartt, author of five editions of the Media & Law Entertainment textbook, says those figures, while potentially correct, are difficult to speculate on from a legal standpoint.
Harry — who, along with his wife, Meghan Markle, stepped down in 2020 from being a working royal — had success previously in a litigation case against a major British newspaper group when suing for misuse of private information and obtaining such information by illegal means, namely phone hacking.
In his case against the Mirror Group Newspapers in 2023, the court awarded £140,600 in general and aggravated damages to the 40-year-old, Smartt says. That payout sum was included in the judge’s ruling.
Smartt says that News Group Newspapers has been keen to avoid trials, instead agreeing to private settlements with a host of famous figures, from retired soccer player Paul Gascoigne to Spice Girls singer Melanie Chisholm, in what has been a costly outlay.
“We have by now seen a common theme in these trials against newspapers with these agreed settlements out of court,” says Smartt.
“We know that there are substantial damages in each case, but we will never know how much. News Group Newspapers alone has settled with more than 1,300 claimants since the phone hacking trials started and spent upwards of £1 billion ($1.23 billion) in payouts,” she adds.
Harry, who is fifth in line to the British throne, seemed determined to “have his day in court,” notes Smartt, but ended up backing away from an open trial after a five-year legal battle.
Smartt says she does not believe Harry was reluctant about having to divulge personal information while on the stand because he had “got it all off his chest” in his memoir, “Spare,” which was published in 2023.
There was one person, however, who may not have been as keen for Harry’s wilder days to be revisited in the press during reporting of a trial — King Charles.
“Would his father, the king, want the dirty laundry of the royals washed in public?” she asks. “I mean, this would have been the trial of the century. The media was already queuing up for it. The king will, I think, have strongly encouraged his son to settle.”
Instead of a trial of accountability, as Harry had originally pushed for, he had to settle — quite literally — for a throaty apology from Murdoch’s company that also mentioned his mother and the intrusion upon her private life and his childhood. That belated apology to Diana, who died after being chased by paparazzi in Paris in 1997, would likely have meant a great deal to her youngest son.
News Group Newspapers also received something it wanted, Smartt points out — deniability. “The payouts mean they have never admitted liability — this is important,” she says.
“They will admit that they paid for private detectives who hacked and investigated — some private investigators who hacked for the newspapers, they have done jail time.
“But News Group Newspapers have been adamant that it wasn’t carried out by their own journalists and that their editors didn’t know it was going on,” Smartt says.
Now that the legal battle is over, Harry and other claimants continue to push for Parliament and police to reopen an investigation into phone hacking by the British press. But another pretrial settlement means any fresh allegations still remain closely under wraps.