Prince Harry accuses British tabloids of having “incited to hate and harassment” in his private life in a written document released this Tuesday in the United Kingdom at the time that he testifies in the High Court of London in the case of the alleged illegal eavesdropping on the Daily Mirror. The Duke of Sussex, 38 years old and resident in the United States, testifies today before this British court for the lawsuit against the Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), accused of having engaged in illegal practices to obtain exclusives.
The youngest son of King Carlos III, who is being questioned by MGN’s lawyer, Andrew Green, states in the document that “it is no secret” that he has had, and continues to have, “a very difficult relationship with the tabloids in the United Kingdom” and reproaches the media for having “typecast” members of royalty, in his case referred to as “the idiot” or the “irresponsible who takes drugs”.
He laments, according to this, that “you are either the womanizing prince, the failure, the outcast or, in my case, the idiot, the cheater, the underage drinker, the irresponsible drug taker, and the list goes on.”
“When I was a teenager and in my early twenties, I ended up feeling that I was behaving following the pattern set by many of the headlines and stereotypes that were assigned to me, mainly because I thought, if they are already posting this crap about me and people believe it, I might as well ‘commit the crime’, so to speak,” he explains.
Along these lines, Enrique admits that he plunged into a “downhill spiral” in which these sensationalist media “constantly” tried to “fool the troubled youngster into doing something stupid that would later lead to a good story and sell many newspapers.” “.
“Looking back now, that kind of conduct on your part is utterly vile,” declares.
In his complaint against the aforementioned media group, the Duke alleges that journalists from the MGN headlines -which include the Sunday Mirror and the Sunday People- intercepted private phones and hired detectives to collect personal information on celebrities, which they then aired with all detail.
In his speech today, Enrique focuses on 33 articles of the 140 publishedbetween 1996 and 2010 by the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and The People tabloids, which, according to him, contained information collected using illegal methods.
For its part, MGN has denied or not admitted them and also argues that some of the plaintiffs have transferred their particular cases to court too late.
Enrique’s case, which has aroused a great deal of media attention and has gathered dozens of reporters outside the courthouse, is exposed at the same time as those of three other accusations considered “representative” of celebrities in the country, as part of a judicial process that began last month and will last about seven weeks.
The prince appeared last March before that same court in a preliminary hearing in relation to a separate accusation against Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), owner of the Daily Mail and Mail On Sunday.
It has also taken legal action against News Group Newspapers, owners of The Sun and the now-defunct News Of The World.