Prince Harry is accused of having "deliberately destroyed" potential evidence in his ongoing phone hacking claim against the publisher of The Sun.
According to NewYork Post, in December, the London High Court declared that the Duke of Sussex had been the victim of "modest" phone hacking and other illegal information collection by British newspaper journalists.
As a result, Prince Harry was granted a sum of $180,700.
However, a lawyer for The Sun, more than six months after the decision, charged Harry with "shocking" and "extraordinary" misdirection.
Attorney Anthony Hudson said in High Court that Harry had deleted texts with the ghostwriter who wrote his shocking book, "Spare," which was published in January 2023,
But, Harry’s attorney refuted the allegations, claiming that by obtaining records at such a late stage of the lawsuit, News Group Newspapers was participating in a "classic fishing expedition."
“NGN’s tactical and sluggish approach to disclosure wholly undermines the deliberately sensational assertion that the claimant [Harry] has not properly carried out the disclosure exercise,” Harry’s attorney, David Sherborne, said in court papers.
He added, “This is untrue. In fact, the claimant has already made clear that he has conducted extensive searches, going above and beyond his obligations.”
According to Hudson, the Duke has set up an "obstacle course" to get the papers the publisher is looking for.
“If the claimant wanted his documents from his former solicitors’ or from the royal household … he would have got them,” the attorney said.
The presiding judge, Timothy Fancourt, stated on Thursday that it was "troubling" that the records had been deleted after the case had started.
Judge Fancourt ordered that communications between Harry and his ghostwriter, JR Moehringer, be retrieved immediately.
In 2019, Prince Harry filed a lawsuit against Mirror Group Newspapers, the company that publishes the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, and Sunday People.
He claimed that MGN had targeted him for 15 years starting in 1996 and that over 140 stories in its publications were the product of illegal information collection.
