Prince Harry will become the first senior member of the British royal family to give evidence in a legal trial in over 130 years as he advances in his lawsuit against a U.K. tabloid publisher this week.
Harry will appear at London’s High Court to take part in the trial connected with his joint lawsuit with a number of other high-profile figures over historic allegations of illegal information gathering against Daily Mirror publisher Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN).
In a near unprecedented move, the royal is expected to step into the witness box on Tuesday to discuss his case at trial, which will include the impact that stories written about him using the alleged unlawful information-gathering techniques had on his personal life, mental health and relationships.
Harry’s case within the wider group’s claim is one of a sample of four selected to be heard by a judge at the trial starting Monday. The prince has supplied 140 articles published by MGN’s titles between 1996 and 2011 which he claims were obtained illegally.
At a pre-trial hearing, the publisher admitted one case of wrongdoing, stating that journalists “for whom the Defendant [MGN] was responsible instructed private investigators to unlawfully obtain private information about [Prince Harry],” however, it has denied a number of other allegations and all suggestions it engaged in the hacking of phones.
Among the evidence supplied by Harry’s legal team in the preliminary hearings was journalist Omid Scobie’s testimony that he had been instructed on how to hack voicemails while working at the Sunday People newspaper, an MGN title.
Scobie said he did not carry out any phone hacking while at the newspaper.
Scobie also claimed that while working at the Daily Mirror in 2002, he was a witness to a conversation between the then editor, Piers Morgan, and another staff member who revealed a story about pop-star Kylie Minogue had been sourced from voicemails.
When asked about phone-hacking during his time as editor at the Daily Mirror, Morgan previously told the BBC: “I’ve never hacked a phone, I’ve never told anyone to hack a phone.”
Royals in Court
It is extremely rare that a member of the British royal family should appear in court, with Harry’s great-great-great-grandfather King Edward VII believed to be the last to do so in giving evidence.
When Prince of Wales, Edward was caught up in a number of society scandals, two of which saw him called before a judge to the anger of his mother, Queen Victoria.
In 1870 the prince was required to give evidence as part of divorce proceedings between Sir Charles Mordaunt and Lady Harriet Mordaunt. The prince was forced to deny having engaged in an improper relationship with the lady after she told her husband she had been unfaithful to him with a number of men after giving birth to a baby daughter.
The divorce proceedings were dropped when a judge ruled that Lady Mordaunt was mentally ill and admitted to an asylum.
The prince was again called to give evidence in court in 1891 amid what was known as the “royal baccarat scandal.”
This concerned an allegation of cheating during an illegal baccarat card game during a house party at the Tranby Croft estate in Yorkshire, at which the prince was present.
A slander case was brought to court by the man accused of cheating and Edward testified that he had not witnessed the act himself but was told after the fact by other players. The jury ruled against the case for slander and the man accused was ostracized from high society.
The last time a senior royal appeared before a court was in 2002 when Queen Elizabeth II‘s only daughter, Princess Anne, faced criminal charges after her dog attacked two children while she was on a walk in the grounds of Windsor Castle.
Anne appeared at a magistrates court in Slough, England, on November 21, 2002, charged under the dangerous dogs act, although she did not appear in the witness box. The princess was told to enrol the dog in a course of training and was fined £500 and ordered to pay £250 in compensation. The children involved were not seriously harmed.
James Crawford-Smith is Newsweek‘s royal reporter, based in London. You can find him on Twitter at @jrcrawfordsmith and read his stories on Newsweek‘s The Royals Facebook page.
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