Prince Harry, Sir Elton John and five other high-profile claimants have been ordered to pay millions of pounds in legal costs after losing their landmark privacy lawsuit against Associated Newspapers Limited, the publisher of the Daily Mail, MailOnline and the Mail on Sunday.
The group of seven lost their case in July, when a High Court judge threw out all of their claims that the publications had unlawfully gathered information for their reporting. The alleged privacy breaches included voicemail interception, phone hacking and the acquisition of personal information through deception. Associated Newspapers denied the allegations throughout, calling them preposterous and arguing at trial that its journalists had relied on legitimate sources, including royal aides.
Following the defeat, the judge ordered the claimants to make an initial payment of £9,544,355, equivalent to about $13 million, toward the publisher's legal costs. The judge declined to cap the total costs the group may ultimately face, with a final figure to be determined at a later hearing. It is one of the largest adverse costs orders against individual claimants in recent British legal history.
The claimants were Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex; Sir Elton John and his husband, the filmmaker David Furnish; the actresses Elizabeth Hurley and Sadie Frost; the campaigner Doreen Lawrence, mother of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence; and the former Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes. They had accused the media group of conducting systematic and unlawful information-gathering over almost two decades, between 1993 and 2011, including the hacking of mobile phones, the interception of landline conversations and the acquisition of confidential material such as medical records and flight information by deception.
The case was first filed in October 2020 and passed through a series of complex preliminary hearings. Associated Newspapers had attempted to have the claims dismissed as out of time and as preposterous smears, but in November 2023 Mrs Justice Nicklin permitted the case to proceed to trial. The claimants' legal team was also allowed to draw on documents from the 2011-12 Leveson Inquiry, the public inquiry into press ethics triggered by the phone-hacking scandal at the Rupert Murdoch-owned News of the World.
In her ruling dismissing the claims, the judge was sharply critical of the way the case had been run, noting that it was striking that not a single allegation of serious wrongdoing had been voluntarily withdrawn by the claimants. Serious allegations of criminality or grave impropriety cannot properly be left hanging over individuals in that way, she said. Harry and Baroness Lawrence responded that the verdict was a complete and obvious whitewash, but sadly not altogether unexpected, adding that the lengths to which the court had gone to exonerate the Mail were as shocking as they were unwarranted.
The defeat marked another setback in Prince Harry's long-running legal war with the British press. Although he has won previous cases against other publishers, the scale of the costs order in this action, combined with the judge's refusal to cap liability, left the group facing a potentially ruinous bill. For the newspaper industry, the outcome was hailed as a significant vindication of its reporting methods; for the claimants, it was a bruising reminder of the financial risks of taking on one of Britain's most powerful media companies and losing.