Prince Harry was also asked to try to recover the messages from Signal. His lawyers were told to look through his other texts, WhatsApp messages, and emails from 2005 to January 2023, when his bestselling autobiography was published, for any important documents.
Anthony Hudson KC, representing News Group Newspapers (NGN), accused Prince Harry of making things difficult and blocking efforts to find important information for the case about his claims of illegal information gathering. Hudson told the high court judge, Mr Justice Fancourt, that Harry had to be pressured into searching his communications.
At the one-day hearing, NGN argued that the Signal messages from 2020 to 2023 were important because Prince Harry's book, "Spare," mentioned his knowledge and suspicion of illegal information gathering before 2013, which is relevant to the case.
Any claim for damages must be made within six years. Since Harry started his legal action in 2019, if he thought he had a case against NGN before 2013, the case might be dismissed because it was filed too late.
In his oral ruling, the judge mentioned "troubling evidence" that many potentially important documents, including private messages between Prince Harry and his ghostwriter JR Moehringer, as well as all drafts of "Spare," were destroyed between 2021 and 2023, long after the claim had started.
Judge Fancourt said it was unclear what happened to the Signal messages between Prince Harry and his ghostwriter. He stated that Prince Harry needs to provide a witness statement explaining what happened to these messages and whether any attempts have been made to recover them.
The judge said it seems very likely that, while discussing the material for Prince Harry's autobiography, they would have talked about the sections of "Spare" that mention illegal information gathering by newspapers.
The judge mentioned that Moehringer wrote in a New Yorker article that he and Harry "were texting around the clock." The judge ordered Harry's lawyers to search his texts, WhatsApp, and Signal messages, as well as his laptop, for relevant documents from 2005 to the end of January 2023, using 47 keywords.
He said efforts should be made to recover the Signal messages that were thought to have been deleted.
The judge also showed serious worry that most of the searches for important documents had been done by Prince Harry himself in California, not by his lawyers. He noted that aside from the articles Harry was upset about and papers related to an earlier attempt to dismiss the case, Harry had only revealed five documents. The judge found this quite surprising and it raised concerns about how thorough the document disclosure process had been.
Harry, who is 39 years old, claims that journalists and private investigators working for NGN, which also owned the now closed News of the World, targeted him. He is one of several individuals suing the publisher, and a full trial for some of these cases is scheduled for January.
The publisher has said in the past that no illegal activities occurred at the Sun.
David Sherborne, who represents Harry, argued that the autobiography was written with the benefit of hindsight and does not reflect Harry's current knowledge at the time. He criticized the defendant's request as a thorough search for potentially unnecessary and disproportionate information, calling it a "classic fishing expedition."
David Sherborne criticized NGN for making exaggerated and attention-grabbing claims that Prince Harry had to be forcefully compelled to disclose documents. He argued that Harry had willingly allowed a thorough search of his emails, which took 150 hours and cost £50,000.
David Sherborne accused NGN of deleting millions of emails in order to conceal potentially damaging evidence. He criticized NGN for hypocrisy in suggesting that Prince Harry was creating obstacles in the legal process.
The judge agreed to NGN's request for Prince Harry's lawyers to send letters to his former solicitors at Harbottle & Lewis, as well as to members of the royal household including Sir Clive Alderton, the private secretary to the king, and Sir Michael Stevens, the keeper of the privy purse. These letters will ask for communication records related to Prince Harry.
Harry was instructed to pay an initial sum of £60,000 towards NGN's legal costs following a judgment that mostly favored the publisher.
SOURCE: The Guardian