Prince Harry Has Stopped Suing—For Now

Prince Harry has filed no new lawsuits in more than a year as he waits for key news on his existing cases.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have filed 10 lawsuits between them since September 2019 and have been dragged into two others. However, Harry has not submitted a single new case since October 2022 despite a steady stream of negative stories about him.

There are a number of possible explanations, not least of all the fact that five of his existing lawsuits are still ongoing.

And this may be a temporary shift. After all, the prince has gone through one other major legal dry patch before. He did not launch any new cases in 2021, only to pick up the pace again with vigor in 2022, when he twice sued the British government and twice the publisher of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday.

However, the past 12 months also saw a major shift in American media coverage of the duke and duchess, which may also complicate any broader strategy of PR through media litigation.

Prince Harry's Ongoing Lawsuits

Two of Prince Harry's current lawsuits were his very first and have been running in the background for four years but also reached crunch moments in 2023.

The duke sued News Group Newspapers, Rupert Murdoch's U.K. press division, which publishes The Sun, on historic allegations of phone hacking and launched a similar litigation against Mirror Group Newspapers in 2019.

He is currently awaiting the verdict in the Mirror case after becoming the first royal to testify in court in more than a century.

A judge ruled his phone hacking allegations against The Sun were filed too late but allowed him to continue to trial with other allegations of unlawful information gathering at the newspaper.

Of his two British government judicial reviews, both related to him losing his police protection detail, one has been thrown out, but the other is still live and heading for a full hearing.

Meanwhile, Harry has an ongoing libel lawsuit against The Mail on Sunday dating back to an article published in 2022 about the police security lawsuit against the Home Office.

Separately, he sued Associated Newspapers, the publisher of the MoS, The Daily Mail and MailOnline, over allegations of phone hacking, wiretapping and other unlawful practices.

The case was filed in October 2022. The publisher has applied for it to be dismissed on grounds of being filed too late while denying the accusations.

The U.S. Media's Shifting Relationship With Harry and Meghan

The prince's most recent lawsuit was filed two months before the release of the couple's Netflix show, Harry & Meghan, in December and his book Spare, in January.

While Harry and Meghan have come to expect a steady stream of negative commentary from British newspapers, including the ones they have sued, winter brought with it the chill wind of ridicule from some unexpected places in America.

Variety's verdict on the long-awaited Netflix biopic was that "at some point, even the dimmest of minds among their fans is going to tire of their 'Oh, woe is us' routine."

After Spare, comedians in the United States cued up to ridicule him, from Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel to Trevor Noah, who had been a guest on Meghan's Archetypes Spotify podcast.

They also plunged in American public opinion, as charted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies on behalf of Newsweek.

South Park did an entire episode mocking the couple's media blitz as a "Worldwide Privacy Tour," prompting feverish speculation about whether or not they would sue, which their spokesperson told Newsweek was "baseless and boring."

In May, they were involved in what their spokesperson described as a two-hour "near catastrophic" car chase in New York. British newspapers deleted the pap images after the couple's complaints, but TMZ stood its ground.

The Sussex camp told Newsweek at the time that they were submitting videos of the incident to the NYPD, but no known prosecutions have followed. They did not file any known civil lawsuits either.

The paparazzi incident and the South Park episode highlight a potential issue they face in a new era of American media criticism.

The British media, for all Harry's criticisms, is governed by far stricter rules than the U.S. media, which has recourse to the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. While the United Kingdom has a free speech right under the Human Rights Act, it does not trump other rights, such as the right to privacy.

Turning a blind eye to South Park may well have simply been a good PR move since suing would have made them appear unable to take a joke.

But some effort was clearly made in relation to photographers in New York. In Britain, the actions of the paparazzi would, at the very least, have been a breach of the newspaper industry regulator IPSO's Editor's Code, hence why U.K. titles deleted the pictures.

America, however, does not have that system, leaving the duke and duchess with fewer tools to take on TMZ.

Comparisons With 2021

Interestingly, their other period of new lawsuit downtime, in 2021, contained a similar episode when Page Six ran photographs of Meghan picking their son, Archie, up from his first day at preschool.

Harry denounced the newspaper in a podcast interview that May but did not sue, no doubt facing the same legal obstacles as he did in May 2023.

"Page Six of The New York Post, they took photos of my son being picked up from school on his first day," he said on The Armchair Expert podcast. "It's this sort of rabid feeding frenzy, and going back to the kids point, it's absolutely true. These kids don't get a choice; they don't get a say in it.

"If it [Paparazzi attention] becomes any worse, then what you're basically accepting is...let's punish people who have got a talent and have literally worked their asses off to get to a point where, yes, they're making money and, yes, their fans are contributing to that, but they're bringing entertainment and value to society."

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

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