Murdoch’s News Group Paid Settlement to Prince William, Court Filing Shows

LONDON — Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper group paid Prince William, the inheritor to the British throne, a “huge sum of money” in 2020 to settle claims that its journalists hacked his cellphone, in response to his brother, Prince Harry.

Harry, who can also be suing Mr. Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers, mentioned in a authorized submitting that the fee grew out of a “secret agreement” between the writer and the royal household, during which the household would defer authorized claims towards the corporate and thus keep away from the spectacle of getting to testify about embarrassing particulars from their intercepted voice mail messages.

Harry didn’t disclose the phrases or measurement of the settlement within the submitting, or consult with particular incidents during which his brother’s calls had been hacked. He mentioned William introduced a declare towards News Group, writer of The Sun and the now-defunct tabloid News of the World, in 2019, years after the criminality happened and the majority of the phone-hacking litigation had been wound up.

A spokesman for Prince William didn’t reply to a request for remark. News Group declined to touch upon whether or not it had settled with William however denied that there had been a secret settlement with the royal household.

Harry’s declare concerning the settlement got here as his personal case towards News Group resumed within the excessive courtroom in London on Tuesday. He has accused The Sun and different tabloids of illegally intercepting his calls and different private info for a few years, and later reneging on an settlement with the royal household to apologize for it.

His declare of a pricey settlement involving his brother was disclosed days after Mr. Murdoch’s Fox Corporation agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation case introduced by the Dominion Voting Systems, the election expertise agency that was derided by a number of Fox News hosts after President Donald J. Trump’s defeat by President Biden in 2020. It additionally comes a day after Fox News’s hottest and inflammatory host, Tucker Carlson, was pressured out in a dismissal that laid naked a brand new degree of turmoil on the community.

For Mr. Murdoch, the disclosures about telephone hacking resurrect one other humbling episode in his lengthy profession, when it was revealed that News of The World reporters had hacked the telephone of a murdered 13-year-old British lady. Mr. Murdoch’s editors and executives had been put within the dock and his firm’s strategies had been broadly excoriated.

Much of Harry’s 31-page assertion is a well-known litany of grievances towards the London tabloids. He mentioned the papers had been responsible of “utterly vile” habits in invading his privateness and that of his future spouse, Meghan Markle, in addition to of a former girlfriend, Chelsy Davy, who was hounded by paparazzi. Among their methods, he mentioned, was to hack his telephone to intercept voice mail messages.

But Harry’s declare of a “secret agreement” between the royal household and senior executives at News Group has not beforehand been disclosed. It was designed, he mentioned, to forestall the airing of additional soiled laundry at a time when the royal household had been caught in a string of scandals.

“The institution was incredibly nervous about this and wanted to avoid at all costs the reputational damage that it had suffered in 1993 when The Sun and another tabloid had unlawfully obtained and published details of an intimate telephone conversation that took place between my father and stepmother in 1989, while he was still married to my mother,” Harry mentioned within the witness assertion.

His reference was to an intercepted telephone name between Charles, then the Prince of Wales, and Camilla Parker-Bowles, with whom Charles was conducting an extramarital affair. At one level, Charles is heard telling her he wished he might “live inside your trousers,” maybe by being reincarnated as a tampon.

Harry’s relationship together with his father and brother has damaged down amid his allegations that the royal household mistreated his spouse, Meghan. In his memoir, “Spare,” Harry describes a poisonous ambiance during which family members share filth on each other with tabloid reporters in an effort to win extra flattering protection of themselves.

Now, in his authorized case, Harry is exhuming among the royal household’s most lurid and cringe-worthy moments on the eve of his father’s coronation as Charles III. Charles later divorced Harry’s mom, Princess Diana, and married Ms. Parker-Bowles, who will likely be topped as Queen Camilla, alongside Charles, on May 6.

Despite the bitter rift, Buckingham Palace not too long ago mentioned that Harry would attend the coronation, although Meghan will stay on the couple’s house in Montecito, Calif., with their two kids, Archie and Lilibet.

Experts on the royal household mentioned the confidential nature of the settlement between William and News Group would result in unwelcome hypothesis, not least as a result of Harry instructed that the deal led to him “going ‘quietly,’ so to speak.”

“He’s absolutely entitled to reach a settlement and he’s absolutely entitled not to tell us the terms of the settlement,” mentioned Peter Hunt, a former royal correspondent for the BBC. “But it will raise all sorts of questions about what else is in the deal.”

“You’re talking about the next constitutional head of state, you’re talking about Rupert Murdoch, and you’re talking about a secret deal,” Mr. Hunt added.

News Group has apologized to different victims of the telephone hacking by News of the World, which Mr. Murdoch shut down after the scandal involving the 13-year-old lady. The firm has additionally reached monetary settlements with a number of victims of hacking. But The Sun, which is combating different hacking lawsuits, has not admitted wrongdoing. News Group contends that Harry’s case mustn’t go to trial as a result of his allegations are too outdated.

“As we reach the tail end of litigation, N.G.N. is drawing a line under disputed matters, some of which date back more than 20 years ago,” a spokeswoman for News Group Newspapers mentioned on Tuesday. “All of these matters are historical, dating back to a period between 1996 and 2012.”

In a courtroom submitting, a lawyer representing News Group, Maxine Gayle Mossman, mentioned she requested a number of senior in-house attorneys at News Corporation who had been concerned within the litigation a few secret settlement with the royal household, and that none “were involved in, informed of, or otherwise aware of any ‘secret agreement.’”

In his submitting, Harry claims that he acquired approval from his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, to demand a proper apology from News Group for the alleged hacking. He describes fruitless efforts to acquire a response from Rebekah Brooks, who then headed Mr. Murdoch’s British papers, and Robert Thomson, the chief govt of News Corporation. Ms. Brooks was discovered not responsible of telephone hacking after a trial in 2014.

Harry mentioned he had felt strain to confront the News Group executives earlier than his 2018 wedding ceremony to Ms. Markle as a result of he didn’t need Mr. Murdoch’s papers to revenue from masking the occasion with out making amends for his or her previous habits.

“I remember going to my brother and saying something along the lines of ‘Enough of this. I want to get permission to push for a resolution to our phone hacking claims and a formal apology from Murdoch before any of his people are allowed anywhere near the wedding,’ ” Harry mentioned in his assertion.