Prince William settled phone-hacking claim against Murdoch group in 2020

In 2020, Prince William’s attorneys settled a phone-hacking claim against Rupert Murdoch’s UK media business for a “very large sum” after a secret deal with Buckingham Palace.

Harry, the younger son of King Charles, is suing News Group Newspapers (NGN) before the High Court in London for several unlawful activities allegedly undertaken on behalf of its Sun and now-defunct News of the World tabloids from the mid-1990s to 2016.

He accuses the media of phone-hacking and obtaining his wife Meghan’s social security number by fraud.

After several News of the World journalists were sentenced for phone-hacking and Murdoch closed it, NGN is seeking to reject his claim, alleging he should have brought it sooner.

It denies Sun employees committed any crimes.

Harry’s legal team said NGN and the “institution”—Buckingham Palace—had agreed to delay any claims until previous phone-hacking action was resolved.

“It is important to bear in mind that in responding to this bid by NGN to prevent his claims going to trial, the claimant has had to make public the details of this secret agreement, as well as the fact that his brother, His Royal Highness, Prince William, has recently settled his claim against NGN behind the scenes,” the document stated.

It stated that NGN had settled with William “for a very large sum of money in 2020”.

According to Harry’s witness statement, the compromise was made to “avoid the situation where a member of the royal family would have to sit in the witness box and recount the specific details of the private and highly sensitive voicemails that had been intercepted”.

Harry said Buckingham Palace “wanted to avoid at all costs” the reputational damage caused by publication in the 1990s of details of a “intimate telephone conversation” between Charles and the now Queen Consort Camilla, when his father was still married to his mother Princess Diana.

Harry’s grandmother, the late Queen Elizabeth, had been involved in conversations and had given her consent for him to pursue his case in 2017, according to a chronology of communications between the Palace and NGN.