Prince William received a “large sum” in phone-hacking lawsuit, Prince Harry says 

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Britain’s Prince William has resolved a phone-hacking claim against Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper unit for a “very large sum” following a covert agreement with Buckingham Palace, according to legal documents filed by the heir’s brother Prince Harry. 

Harry, the younger son of King Charles, is suing Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers (NGN) in the High Court of London for a number of claimed illegal acts carried out on behalf of the Sun and the now-defunct News of the World tabloids between the mid-1990s and 2016. 

NGN, which has spent millions of pounds settling more than a thousand phone-hacking complaints, will try to have the allegations of the prince and British actor Hugh Grant dismissed during three days of preliminary hearings this week by arguing that they should have taken action sooner. 

It also refutes claims that any Sun employees engaged in criminal conduct. 

Harry’s legal team stated in a filing to the court that the reason he had not taken action earlier was due to an agreement between NGN and the “institution” – Buckingham Palace – to postpone any claims until the resolution of other ongoing phone-hacking lawsuits. 

In response to NGN’s attempt to have his claims dismissed before trial, the claimant was forced to reveal the specifics of this covert arrangement as well as the fact that His Royal Highness, Prince William, just reached a settlement with NGN. 

They stated that NGN and William had reached a settlement “for a very large sum of money in 2020.” William’s office stated that it was unable to comment on ongoing court cases. 

Clive Goodman, the former royal editor of News of the World, testified that he had hacked the voicemails of Harry, William, and William’s wife Kate in the mid-2000s during a criminal trial involving News of the World writers and others in 2014. 

According to Goodman, her phone had 155 hacks, William’s had 35, and Harry’s had nine. 

The prince claimed in his testimony, which his attorneys have cited, that the covert agreement was reached to “avoid the situation where a member of the royal family would have to sit in the witness box and recount the specific details of the private and highly sensitive voicemails that had been intercepted.” 

When details of a “intimate telephone conversation” between Charles and Camilla, the current Queen Consort, were published in the 1990s, when Harry’s father was still married to his mother Princess Diana, Harry said Buckingham Palace “wanted to avoid at all costs” the reputational damage caused. 

In response to the News of the World journalists’ widespread hacking in 2012, Murdoch’s British newspaper company offered an unequivocal apology. The media tycoon had shut down the News of the World due to outrage. 

Rebekah Brooks, the former editor of the Sun and current CEO of his British arm, News UK, has long dismissed any illegal behaviour at the publication, nevertheless. In the 2014 trial for complicity, she was found not guilty while constantly denying knowledge of phone hacking. 

Earlier this week, Murdoch’s Fox Corp. paid $787.5 million to resolve a defamation case in the United States, although sources indicate the sum is eclipsed by the British phone-hacking incident.

-by Khushboo Singh

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