Prince Harry accused of deliberately destroying evidence in phone hacking case
The legal war between Prince Harry and major British tabloids continues as an attorney for the publisher of The Sun has accused the runaway royal of destroying evidence in his phone hacking case.
Attorney Anthony Hudson, representing News Group Newspapers, has alleged the Duke of Sussex deliberately deleted text messages with J.R. Moehringer, the ghostwriter of his tell-all memoir, “Spare.”
Hudson told London’s High Court on Thursday that Prince Harry had created an “obstacle course” to prevent the publisher from obtaining potential evidence.
According to The Telegraph, Justice Timothy Fancourt said he found the lack of documentation handed over so far to be “cause for concern.” He cited “troubling evidence that a large number of potentially relevant documents and confidential messages … were destroyed sometime between 2021 and 2023.”
The judge ordered a statement from Prince Harry to explain “what happened to the messages between himself and his ghostwriter and whether any attempts were made to retrieve them.”
A lawyer for Prince Harry meanwhile argued in court documents that NGN was engaging in a “classic fishing expedition” by seeking documents they should have sought much sooner for the trial scheduled for January.
“NGN’s tactical and sluggish approach to disclosure wholly undermines the deliberately sensational assertion that (Harry) has not properly carried out the disclosure exercise,” he wrote. “This is untrue. In fact, (Harry) has already made clear that he has conducted extensive searches, going above and beyond his obligations.”
Thursday’s hearing was the latest in the 39-year-old’s legal saga with Britain’s biggest tabloids over alleged phone hacking and other illegal measures to gather personal information on him.
He’s among dozens of claimants alleging that NGN journalists violated their privacy by intercepting voicemails, tapping phones, bugging cars and using deception to dig up dirt between 1994 and 2016.
