Weeks following King Charles’ coronation, Prince Harry is back to his homeland, but this time, his visit isn’t related to his nearly ‘estranged’ family. In fact, the Prince is back in Britain for a court case against The Sun and Daily Mirror whom he sued back in 2019 for unlawfully stealing his voicemails after hacking his phone.
The claims against the Mirror Group Newspapers were filed in the High Court of Justice on Harry’s behalf, involving “illegal interception of voicemail messages,” Buckingham Palace confirmed, but no further details had been revealed back then.
Harry’s relationship with the British press has never been a friendly one as he believes they are to be partially blamed for his mother’s car crash, who died while being chased by the paparazzi. Further, Harry claimed that the tabloids have been attacking his wife, Meghan Markle, in a similar manner to that they used with late Princess Diana.
Harry isn’t the sole celebrity who’s suing the newspapers. On the contrary, over 100 other people, including the estate of the late George Michael, are suing the Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) for alleged misuse of private information between 1991 and 2011. It includes phone hacking and intercepting voicemails. Allegedly, senior executives were aware of the hacking and turned a blind eye.
According to Harry’s claim, over 140 published stories by the newspapers that were written about him were the result of unlawful behavior, and the trial involves just 33 of them.
“As a teenager and in my early 20s, I ended up feeling as though I was playing up to a lot of the headlines and stereotypes that [the tabloid press] wanted to pin on me mainly because I thought that, if they are printing this rubbish about me and people were believing it, I may as well ‘do the crime,’ so to speak,” Harry said in the statement, further adding that these articles played a destructive role during his childhood and teenage years.
“It was a downward spiral, whereby the tabloids would constantly try and coax me, a ‘damaged’ young man, into doing something stupid that would make a good story and sell lots of newspapers.
“Looking back on it now, such behavior on their part is utterly vile.”
Among the many things that got destructed by these published articles involving Harry was his relationship with ex-girlfriend Chelsy Davy. When Harry entered the High Court on Wednesday, he opened up about his former relationship and said that it was doomed because of “the prying eyes of the tabloids.”
“It was just that feeling of being under surveillance all the time,” the 38-year-old wrote. “I believe Chelsy found this even more difficult to deal with when she lived in England … everyone has a limit as to what they can endure,” The Duke of Sussex said as reported by The New York Times.
Speaking of the time the two met, Harry said that Davy knew very little about his family. “Unlike so many girls I met, she wasn’t visibly fitting herself for a crown the moment she shook my hand… Not only was she uninterested in my title, she seemed bored by it,” he wrote in his all-tell memoir Spare.
At the time, he believed she was the one, but it was the media that caused him troubles as he was worried that they “would cost me another person I cared about.”
Allegedly, in the 55-page-long submission to the High Court, Harry revealed he flirted with another woman while dating Davy, calling himself “immature” and stating he made a “stupid decision.”
“I hadn’t really thought about my actions, and I had made a stupid decision,” Harry said as per The Sun. “It was a challenging period for me.”
In an article titled Chelsy Is Not Happy, the author wrote how Davy learned Harry visited a lap-dancing club back in 2006 and was furious because of that. She allegedly screamed to him on the phone. “It said she slammed the phone down because she was too angry and then called back to scream at me for half an hour,” Harry said of the article and added he doesn’t recall that to be true.
“To the best of my recollection, I don’t think Chelsy did go mad about me going there. We did speak about it over the phone, but I promised her that I hadn’t had a lap dance and stayed with the three other cadets that had girlfriends,” Harry added.
Following his witnessing, experts took stands over whether flirting is in fact cheating, and according to most of them, it is.
For example, licensed family therapist Christie Tcharkhoutian said: “I think the biggest misconception is that cheating has to be physical— that’s not the case. It can be emotional, and it can be flirting… If you don’t ask yourself the deeper questions, flirting may become a gateway drug to cheating down the line.”
Harry and Chelsy Davy called their relationship quits in 2011 but remained good friends. She attended Kate and William’s wedding, and later, Harry and Meghan’s as well.
In 2022, Davy married husband Sam Cutmore-Scott and they welcomed a son together.
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