Prince Harry “deliberately destroyed” potential evidence relating to his High Court phone hacking claim against the publisher of The Sun,
it has been claimed, as a judge ordered him to explain himself.
The Duke of Sussex must personally disclose why and how drafts of his memoir, Spare,
and messages exchanged with his ghostwriter were destroyed “well after” he sued News Group Newspapers (NGN) in 2019.
Mr Justice Fancourt said it was “troubling” that the documents and conversations, which likely contained references to unlawful information gathering,
had been deleted when the case was already well underway.
He said efforts must be made to retrieve the messages sent between the Duke and JR Moehringer, the author.
The judge also ordered the Duke’s legal team to write to Sir Clive Alderton, the King’s private secretary, and Sir Michael Stevens, his treasurer and keeper of the Privy Purse, asking them to submit all records of communication with the Duke.
It came after Anthony Hudson KC, for NGN, suggested that the Duke had “deliberately destroyed” potential evidence.
‘Old hand at disclosure’
The Duke and more than 40 others are suing NGN over alleged unlawful information gathering and invasion of privacy. A trial has been scheduled for January 2025.
The publisher sought the release of emails as well as text messages and WhatsApp messages sent and received by the Duke, as well as material held on two encrypted hard drives.
The judge said the lack of documentation handed over so far by the Duke’s legal team was “rather remarkable” and gave him “cause for concern”.
He told the court: “I have also seen troubling evidence that a large number of potentially relevant documents and confidential messages between the Duke and the ghost writer of Spare were destroyed some time between 2021 and 2023, well after this claim was under way.
“The position is not transparently clear about what happened and needs to be made so by way of a witness statement from the claimant himself – what happened to the messages between himself and his ghost writer and whether any attempts were made to retrieve them.”
He added: “It seems to me inherently likely that matters would have been said which relate to the parts of Spare in which unlawful information gathering is discussed.”
‘Texting around the clock’
The judge also expressed disbelief that the majority of document searches made in relation to the case – for potential evidence of prior knowledge of unlawful information gathering – had been “dealt with by the Duke himself in California.”
In his own witness statement, Roddy Chisholm Batten,the Duke’s solicitor, claimed he was “an old hand at dealing with disclosure” as a result of his hacking claim against Mirror Group Newspapers.
However, the judge said it was “not appropriate in a case of this nature” for such searches to be made by the claimant personally.
“Sometimes, I have the impression that even the claimant’s lawyers don’t seem to grapple with the knowledge issue… so it would not be at all surprising if the claimant himself did not fully understand,” he told the court.
The judge also revealed that the Royal household had given “a large group of documents” to the Duke in 2020 – a development of which his own legal team was “wholly unaware” until this month.
In May 2008, Moehringer wrote about the process of writing the Duke’s biography for the New Yorker magazine.
“When we weren’t Zooming or phoning, we were texting around the clock,” he revealed.
“In due time, no subject was off the table. I felt honoured by his candour, and I could tell that he felt astonished by it. And energised.”
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Source: CNN
