Prince Harry's Media Broadside Damns His Own Book

Prince Harry told a judge that a tabloid story about him having glandular fever led to him being "teased endlessly" at school, but he has revealed private details about members of his family, including his niece Princess Charlotte, in his best-selling book.

The Duke of Sussex is suing Mirror Group Newspapers for alleged phone hacking and issued a 55-page witness statement in which he denounced "disturbing" stories in the publisher's U.K. titles. The Mirror Group denies phone hacking.

The prince gave the British media both barrels, asking: "How much more blood will stain their typing fingers before someone can put a stop to this madness?"

The articles in his complaint date from 1996 to 2010, before Harry quit as a working royal. However, nowadays, he is not only the subject of news stories but also the author of bombshell allegations, including in his book Spare.

The memoir was the fastest selling in history and its dramatic revelations reached a global audience of millions via news stories and social media posts, in addition to the record-breaking sales figures.

His words, therefore, may well have reached an audience far larger than the U.K.- focused newspapers he is criticizing.

It all means Harry has been meting out some of the treatment he got from the press to members of his own family, though of course there is nothing to suggest the prince has engaged in any of the illegal practices he has accused the Mirror Group of.

Harry's witness statement to the court, however, issues a damning indictment of the impact the coverage had on his life even before he came to believe the information was obtained illegally.

For example, a 2002 Mirror story about him getting glandular fever, known as the "kissing disease," left him "miserable."

"It's one of those infections that had a huge stigma attached to it when you're a teenager," his witness statement said, "which is exactly what the article itself is playing on, and the impact on me was huge.

"Whenever anyone got it while we were at school, they would be teased endlessly whenever people knew, and this article made sure the whole country knew about my diagnosis.

"The whole school seemed to know, no one would go near me and I was a bit of a laughing stock. I felt miserable. The timing of the article was also horrible."

There is a right to privacy in relation to medical information and Harry no doubt has every right to ask for sympathy if he proves his case.

However, his account of the emotional impact the story had on him asks serious questions about his own revelations in his book.

In Spare, he revealed that Princess Charlotte—the now 8-year-old daughter of his brother William and his wife Kate—cried when she tried on her bridesmaid's dress for the first time, publicizing her private emotional experiences when she was aged just three.

He wrote: "Charlotte's dress is too big, too long, too baggy. She cried when she tried it on at home, Kate said."

The Mirror journalist could not have known whether Harry would have been relentlessly teased about glandular fever, and Harry cannot know whether Charlotte will be teased about her bridesmaid's dress. But in both cases, private details were published irrespective of the potential impact on children at school.

Harry's interpretation of the motives of journalists was at times challenged, including in relation to a story about the breakup of his relationship with ex-Chelsy Davy.

The Sunday Mirror ran the headlines, "Hooray Harry's Dumped," which the duke suggested was celebrating the collapse of the relationship, a contention firmly rejected by the newspaper's lawyer, Andrew Green.

The attorney suggested "Hooray Harry" was a nickname and pointed to a quote from a friend of Davy's saying she "just got tired of his hooray lifestyle."

By contrast, Harry appears to see no problem with some of his own swipes at family members and in January told Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes he had not intended to hurt his family.

Cooper read the prince a section of his book about William: "I looked at Willy, really looked at him maybe for the first time since we were boys. I took it all in, his familiar scowl, which had always been his default in dealings with me, his alarming baldness, more advanced than my own, his famous resemblance to Mummy which was fading with time, with age."

Cooper said "that's pretty cutting" but Prince Harry replied: "I don't see it as cutting at all. Um, you know, my brother and I love each other. I love him deeply.

"There has been a lot of pain between the two of us, especially the last six years. None of anything I've written, anything that I've included is ever intended to hurt my family."

It is questionable whether Harry would take such a measured stance if a tabloid newspaper in Britain had referred to his "alarming baldness" given his response to some of the stories written about him in the British press.

It is not only his current case against the Mirror Group, where the trial continues.

His wife Meghan Markle was accused of drawing "extreme" interpretations of the meaning of stories in the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and Mail Online during her privacy and copyright lawsuit over a letter she sent her father.

During its early stages, she submitted nine stories as evidence the publisher had an "obvious agenda of publishing intrusive or offensive stories about [Meghan] intended to portray her in a false and damaging light."

While some were certainly critical, she also included what appears to be a straightforward lifestyle feature about a bath tub she said she did not own.

The headline read: "Luxury on tap! Meghan Markle and Prince Harry splash out up to £5,000 on a hand made copper bath for Frogmore Cottage—but muddy dog RUINS luxury carpet just days after it was fitted."

While it is embarrassing for the newspaper that Meghan denies ever owning it, there do not appear to be any explicit criticisms of her in the article which compares the decor to a luxury hotel favored by celebrities: "Very like Soho Farmhouse but better."

Meghan's lawyers said in a court filing seen by Newsweek: "The clear intention was to portray [Meghan] in a damaging light by suggesting that she had indulged in this series of absurdly lavish renovations, which were in fact false (as the [Mail] was informed at the time) and entirely made up."

While there have certainly been many negative stories in the British media about the couple, the severe condemnation Harry and Meghan mete out to relatively trivial news stories raises questions about how the other royals should judge the Sussexes' criticisms of them.

For example, Harry and Meghan allowed the world to believe they had accused the royals of racism for almost two years before the prince then revealed in January that they considered them guilty of the lesser offence of unconscious bias.

In Spare, the prince revealed a private conversation he had with King Charles III and Prince William in the emotional hours after Prince Philip's funeral: "Willy in particular didn't want to hear anything.

"After he'd shut me down several times, he and I began sniping, saying some of the same things we'd said for months—years. It got so heated that Pa raised his hands. Enough!

"He stood between us, looking up at our flushed faces: 'Please, boys—don't make my final years a misery.' His voice sounded raspy, fragile. It sounded, if I'm being honest, old."

On Camilla, he wrote: "I didn't relish losing a second parent, and I had complex
feelings about gaining a step-parent who, I believed, had recently sacrificed
me on her personal PR altar."

"I recall wondering," he added, "right before the tea, if she'd be mean to me. If she'd be like all the wicked stepmothers in storybooks. But she wasn't."

In his 60 Minutes interview with Cooper, he said: "The need for her [Camilla] to rehabilitate her image...that made her dangerous because of the connections that she was forging within the British press.

"And there was open willingness on both sides to trade information and with a family built on hierarchy, and with her on the way to being Queen Consort, there was going to be people or bodies left in the street because of that."

It is tempting to think that Camilla's response to Harry may be more mild than Harry's to the media, but if he were to be judged according to the bar he sets for the British press, then he too would have some explaining to do.

In the media, Prince Harry has picked a popular enemy hated and distrusted on both sides of the political divide and there is no doubt that many members of the public sympathize with him in relation to their biggest misdeeds.

The only problem is, he has also become the media and the more harshly he condemns the media's smaller faults, the more inglorious his biggest missteps appear.

Jack Royston is chief royal correspondent for Newsweek, based in London. You can find him on Twitter at @jack_royston and read his stories on Newsweek's The Royals Facebook page.

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