Prince Harry's decision to drop his high-profile libel lawsuit against a British tabloid publisher this month has refocused attention on...
Prince Harry's decision to drop his high-profile libel lawsuit against a British tabloid publisher this month has refocused attention on whether he suffered reputational damage as a result of their report, according to a new episode of Newsweek's The Royal Report podcast.
On January 19, Harry's legal team dropped their lawsuit against the Mail on Sunday's publisher, Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), over a February 2022 story that inferred the prince had sought to mislead the public over his security legal battle with the United Kingdom government.
The story was published with the headline: "Exclusive: How Prince Harry tried to keep his legal fight with the government over police bodyguards a secret... then—just minutes after the story broke—his PR machine tried to put a positive spin on the dispute."
In 2023, Harry received a legal boost in the case when a judge ruled that the article had a defamatory meaning, however, a later request for a summary judgement was denied, as it was felt the publisher had a "real prospect" of arguing their case at trial.
After the lawsuit was dropped this month, a spokesperson for Harry told Newsweek that after two years, the prince's main focus now was on his legal case against the U.K. government to see if they acted within the law when taking the decision to remove his state-funded bodyguards in 2020.
If the libel lawsuit had gone to trial, ANL's legal team would have had to justify their decision to publish their article. Harry's team would have argued he suffered reputational damage as a result to determine damages, something that Newsweek chief royal correspondent Jack Royston told Royal Report listeners may have proved challenging.
"Defamation law is not actually in reality about truth and lies, it's about reputation," Royston said. "You can only sue if a statement lowers you in the estimation of right-thinking members of society generally. In other words, you're supposed to have been in some way damaged by the story that's being published. That is the point of defamation law."
Where this relates to Harry, Royston suggested that public opinion of the prince has been so polarized over the past five years that it may have been hard to argue one article made a significant difference. There is also a suggestion that rather than media articles, it has been Harry's own actions and comments that have posed the greatest threat to his public reputation.
"Harry has been written about since the day he was born. There were stories about him while he was still in the womb, hundreds of thousands of news stories spanning 40 years. This one throwaway story in the Mail on Sunday was never going to have materially impacted his reputation," Royston said.
"How Britain views Harry is really deeply entrenched, and it took an earthquake the size of the Oprah Winfrey interview to make a dent in it. It took them quitting the royal family to make a dent in his reputation. It took Spare, his biography, to make a dent in his reputation...So one single throwaway story in the Mail was never going to make a difference to Harry's reputation in the eyes of the British public."
Harry's general popularity in Britain remained high until 2021, when it saw a significant decline following his interview with Oprah, declining again after the publication of his memoir in January 2023. Since then, it has has begun to slowly move in a more positive direction.
To this point, Royston said: "Everybody who has an opinion already knows what their opinion of [Harry] is."
Though Harry now faces paying the publisher's legal costs following the discontinuation of his libel lawsuit, is not his only legal action against ANL.
In November 2023, a judge ruled that the prince and several other high-profile public figures could proceed to trial with allegations of historic unlawful information gathering against the publisher.
The prince has previously stated that he considers it to be his "life's mission" to hold the media to account for any wrongdoing, and has also sued two other major tabloid publishers for similar unlawful information gathering claims.
Though the prince has dropped his own libel lawsuit against ANL, his wife Meghan Markle won her own case against them in 2021 over the publication of a private letter she wrote to her father, Thomas Markle, in 2018.
In addition to his unlawful information-gathering lawsuits, Harry's legal action against the U.K. Home Office remains ongoing.
