Prince Harry set to enter the witness box in fight against U.K. tabloid publisher

LONDON — Prince Harry will enter the witness box on Wednesday in his final legal showdown with Britain’s tabloid media.

It will be the estranged royal’s second time testifying in court, and comes as he leads a privacy lawsuit against one of Britain’s biggest news organizations.

A spokesperson for the Duke of Sussex said his testimony would begin at 11:30 a.m. local time (6:30 a.m. ET) at the High Court in London, where he is leading a group of seven high-profile claimants, including Elton John and actors Elizabeth Hurley and Sadie Frost in their case against Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL).

They accused ANL, the publisher of the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday newspapers, of using unlawful methods to snoop on them for sensational headlines, including the tapping and hacking of phones and obtaining private medical and financial records through deception, chiefly between 1993 and 2011.

ANL has strenuously denied the allegations and called them “preposterous smears.”

Harry broke with tradition in 2023, when he became the first senior royal in 130 years to give evidence in court during a lawsuit against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), the publisher of the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People tabloids.

King Edward VII had been the last to do so when he testified as a witness in part of a divorce case in 1870 and 20 years later in a slander trial over a card game, both while he was Prince of Wales and before he became king.

Speculation has been rife about whether the end of the case could lead to a reconciliation with his father, King Charles III, after years of mounting royal tensions.

But the king is in Scotland this week, as are Prince William and Princess Kate, and Harry’s spokesperson declined to comment on whether he had plans to meet his family.

Harry, who is fifth-in-line to the throne, has blamed the tabloid press for the death of his mother, Princess Diana, and has been critical about their treatment of his wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.

He won a payout from MGN and in January 2025 he was awarded substantial damages and an apology from News Group Newspapers, Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper arm, which settled ahead of a trial.

Opening the trial on Monday, Harry’s lawyer David Sherborne said there was “clear, systematic and sustained use of unlawful information gathering at both the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday.”

While Associated Newspapers Limited had sworn “they were a clean ship,” he said the publisher “knew that these emphatic denials were not true” and “they had skeletons in their closet.”

The company’s vigorous denials, destruction of records and “masses upon masses of missing documents” had prevented the claimants from learning what the newspapers had done, he added.

ANL has denied the allegations.

In a submission to the court on Monday, ANL’s lawyer Antony White said its editors and journalists were “lining up” to reject the claimants’ “allegations of habitual and widespread phone hacking, phone tapping and blagging within the organization.”

It added that the claimants had ”failed to establish that the most serious categories of alleged unlawful information gathering – phone hacking and phone tapping – took place at Associated at all, and their allegation of burglary to order was struck out by the Court. The allegation that these practices were ‘habitual and widespread’ at Associated’s titles was simply untrue.”