Prince Harry Whacks Rupert Murdoch-Owned Tabloid & Others With Phone Hack Claims

Dominic Patten

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Three days after Meghan Markle sued The Mail on Sunday and its parent company Associated Newspapers in the UK for publishing one of her private letters, it has be revealed that her husband Prince Harry is taking on Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun and the owners of fellow tabloid The Daily Mirror.

The September 27 filed claims from the fourth in line to the British throne have to do with “the illegal interception of voicemail messages,” Buckingham Palace confirmed of the sealed suit. Earlier this week, after his wife’s suit was made public, Prince Harry released a letter online decrying how some in the press were “waging campaigns against individuals with no thought to the consequences” – words one could assume he would intend for this matter too.

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The usually loud volume Mirror and their Reach plc owners are keeping quiet for now on the matter, saying they have not been formally notified of the move by Prince Harry. However, Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers did bring their voice to this conversation, so to speak.

“We confirm that a claim has been issued by the Duke of Sussex,” an NGN rep told Deadline today. “We have no further comment to make at the current time.”

With whispers and smoke signals from the wide spread hacking scandal that shook the Mirror organization and the Murdoch media empire and led to the 2011 shuttering of the News of the World Sunday tabloid in the air, what we do know at the current time is that Prince Harry made two separate “confidential information” claims in London’s High Court last week. Byline Investigates were the first to report the claims, which seem like they could go back years to when the thrust of the voicemail hacking efforts by dirt hungry tabloid editors and reporters were brazenly and illegally breaking into communications by celebrities, members of the Royal Family and others.

Facing some Parliamentary scrutiny and backlash, the Murdochs have been estimated to have shelled out over $500 million between defense and settlements stemming from the first round of hacking accusations.

In what little we do now of this new-ish matter, we know for sure that Prince Harry is represented by barrister David Sherborne and Clintons LLP. Sherborne was the lawyer in several high profile settled hacking cases that rocked the UK media in the last decade. In that vein, the Murdochs and their companies have been estimated to have shelled out over $500 million between defense and settlements stemming from the first round of hacking accusations.

Today’s news saw some old rivals from those previous hacking cases cite Prince Harry’s legal move – including “Hacked Off” Hugh Grant and the former Daily Mirror editor-in-chief and Celebrity Apprentice Season 7 winner Piers Morgan, the latter no stranger to knuckle dragging or accusations of hacking:

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