Prince Harry says battles with press contributed to royal family rift

LONDON — Britain’s Prince Harry has blamed the rift between him and much of the rest of the royal family on his ongoing battles with the press.

When asked about the extent to which his fight with the tabloid press “destroyed the relationship with your family,” Harry responded, “I think that’s a certainly a central piece to it,” according to a clip of an interview by Britain’s ITV News that is airing Thursday.

It was “a hard question to answer because anything I say about my family results in a torrent of abuse from the press,” he added.

In recent years, Harry has filed three lawsuits against British tabloids. This interview was his first public statement since his four-year battle with the Mirror Group Newspapers concluded with Britain’s High Court ruling in his favor. The court cited evidence of “widespread and habitual” use of phone hacking, hiring private investigators and other methods to uncover details about Harry’s private life.

“It seems as though they knew something before I even did,” Harry said, referring to a headline suggesting that his then-girlfriend Chelsy Davy was about to break up with him.

“Clearly a headline like that has no public interest whatsoever,” he said, drawing a distinction between what was “public interest and what interests the public.”

Harry and his wife, Meghan, have previously blamed the media for driving the couple to announce they were “stepping back” from their royal duties in 2020.

In 2022, a Netflix series focused primarily on racism and the treatment of Meghan by the media, while also blaming Harry’s older brother, Prince William, the heir to the throne.

The couple accused the royal family of not just failing to support them, but also of engaging in a briefing war in which negative stories were supplied to the media to protect other royals or leaked to protect the palace in what Harry calls a “dirty game.”

According to royal watchers, Harry and William have employed differing tactics for handling scuffles with the press as they balance their privacy with their roles as taxpayer funded public figures, and readers’ sometimes rabid demand for details about their lives.

The princes “express their contempt for the press in different ways,” royal author Tina Brown wrote in her 2022 book “The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor — The Truth and the Turmoil.”

“William with a grim, steely obsession with control; Harry with tortured, vocal, frequently ill-judged condemnation” and a “never-ending flurry of lawsuits” against the media, Brown said.

In a previous interview with ITV, Harry said that his father, King Charles, called his decision to take on the press a “suicide mission.”

Court documents revealed in April 2023 showed that in contrast to Harry’s high-profile lawsuits, William quietly received “a very large sum of money” in a 2020 settlement over phone hacking with News Group Newspapers, owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Harry further said that among his motivations for the lawsuits was the press’s treatment of his late mother, Princess Diana, who died in a car crash while being pursued by paparazzi in 1997. He asserted that his mother was “probably” one of the earliest victims of phone hacking, though this has never been proven in court.

The interview is part of a new documentary on ITV, Tabloids on Trial, that will air in the United Kingdom on Thursday.

Harry has two more civil cases making their way through the British courts, one against Associated Newspapers, which publishes the Daily Mail, and another against News UK, publisher of the Sun.