Prince Harry Finally Gets His Apology (But Not for Meghan)

Photo: Jeenah Moon/The New York Times/Redux

Prince Harry has experienced various business setbacks and royal snubs recently, but he scored a rare win on Wednesday. King Charles’s younger son settled his long-running lawsuit with Rupert Murdoch’s U.K. tabloids, winning an eight-figure sum and an unprecedented apology.

The deal was announced a day after a trial was set to begin over phone hacking and other illegal activities Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers (NGN) engaged in years ago to gather information about Harry and other prominent people. NGN has long acknowledged that staffers at the shuttered News of the World engaged in phone-hacking, but this is the first time the company admitted to wrongdoing at The Sun.

In the statement, NGN said it “offers a full and unequivocal apology to the Duke of Sussex for the serious intrusion by The Sun between 1996 and 2011 into his private life, including incidents of unlawful activities carried out by private investigators working for The Sun.”

It went on to apologize to Harry “for the phone hacking, surveillance and misuse of private information by journalists and private investigators instructed by them at the News of the World.”

The statement also included an apology for the publisher’s treatment of Harry’s late mother, Princess Diana:

NGN further apologises to the Duke for the impact on him of the extensive coverage and serious intrusion into his private life as well as the private life of Diana, Princess of Wales, his late mother, in particular during his younger years.

Harry’s lawyer, David Sherborne, described the outcome in court as “a monumental victory” and “a vindication for the hundreds of other claimants who were strong-armed into settling, without being able to get to the truth of what was done to them.”

Harry and former Labour Party leader Tom Watson, who was also named in the apology, were the last two people pursuing litigation with NGN over phone hacking. As the New York Times notes, “Mr. Murdoch’s companies have used lucrative payoffs to avert trials in 1,300 cases stemming from the phone hacking scandal.” That figure includes Harry’s estranged older brother, Prince William; in 2023, court documents from Harry’s case revealed that William settled with NGN for a “very large sum of money” in 2020.

Harry did not get absolutely everything he wanted in the settlement. He had said he wanted the case to go to trial to publicly expose The Sun’s wrongdoing, but now NGN has avoided what could have been weeks of damaging testimony. If Harry had refused the settlement offer, he could have been on the hook for both sides’ legal fees under U.K. law; analysts told the Washington Post, “it would have been reasonable to expect Harry’s trial to cost roughly 1 million pounds ($1.2 million) in legal fees for each week the court was in session.”

The NGN statement did not accept Harry’s claims that its papers also targeted his wife, Meghan Markle. As Newsweek notes, in a 2023 court statement Harry accused The Sun of hiring a private investigator “to obtain private information in the form of a report about my new relationship with Meghan.” The statement only acknowledges “unlawful activities” conducted between 1996 and 2011; that’s prior to the start of their relationship, and Meghan is not named.