Prince Harry accused the monarchy of "withholding information" from him about phone hacking while reaching an "agreement" with Rupert Murdoch's media empire.
The Duke of Sussex is suing the publisher of the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday over alleged bugging, getting personal information through deception and breaching his privacy. But he is at risk of seeing the case thrown out due to being filed too long after the incidents complained about.
Harry sought to justify the long time span by saying Buckingham Palace held back information about his status as a phone hacking victim.
In a witness statement seen by Newsweek Tuesday, he said: "It is important to emphasise that from 2005 I never had any interface or interaction with the family [legal] representative, Gerrard Tyrrell, who, in hindsight, was clearly getting instructions from within the Institution not to involve myself or William about phone hacking by the News of the World.
"No one was ever brought together for a discussion and there were no structured meetings of any sort, certainly none that I was invited to or made aware of. I only really started to regularly speak with Gerrard when I started dating Meghan, about the defamatory stories then being published."
By contrast, he said the palace made a deal with Rupert Murdoch's News Group Newspapers [NGN], publisher of both the News of the World and The Sun.
"There was in place an agreement between the Institution and NGN that we would not engage, or even discuss, the possibility of bringing claims against NGN until the litigation against it relating to phone hacking was over," he wrote.
"The Institution made it clear that we did not need to know anything about phone hacking and it was made clear to me that the Royal Family did not sit in the witness box because that could open up a can of worms.
"The Institution was without a doubt withholding information from me for a long time about NGN's phone hacking and that has only become clear in recent years
as I have pursued my own claim with different legal advice and representation."
Harry and six other claimants, including Elizabeth Hurley and Elton John, have accused Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Mail newspapers, of using wiretaps, phone hacking, bugging and other unlawful techniques. Some of the allegations date back to 1993.
The newspaper group has applied to have the case thrown out on the basis the allegations are more than six years old and the attempt is being heard over four days at the High Court in London.
Harry said the Mail left him paranoid and so suspicious that he cut off friends fearing they were leaking to the press.
He painted a picture of palace life defined by distance among family members, who he said simply did not speak to each other about the ways they were separately targeted by journalists.
He wrote: "To this day, there are members of the Royal Family and friends of mine who may have been targeted by NGN and I have no idea whether they have or have not brought claims. There was never any centralised discussion between us about who had brought claims as each office in the Institution is siloed. There is this misconception that we are all in constant communication with one another but that is not true."
The witness statement added: "My claim is that Associated's journalists and/or private investigators engaged by it targeted me and those closest to me via unlawful methods in an effort to obtain, and misuse, my private information and whereabouts which was subsequently published in its newspapers.
"Those unlawful information gathering techniques included the hacking of my voicemails, landline tapping, blagging, obtaining itemised phone bills, hardwire tapping, and obtaining private flight information for my former girlfriend, Chelsy Davy, amongst other criminal methods, all of which was deliberately undertaken with the purpose of publishing articles about me in the Defendant's newspapers because it made them money."
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.
Do you have a question about King Charles III, William and Kate, Meghan and Harry, or their family that you would like our experienced royal correspondents to answer? Email royals@newsweek.com. We'd love to hear from you.
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About the writer
Jack Royston is Newsweek's Chief Royal Correspondent based in London, U.K. He reports on the British royal family—including King Charles ... Read more
