Prince Harry has said a series of articles published in British tabloid the Mail on Sunday have caused “serious damage to his reputation and substantial hurt, embarrassment and distress which is continuing,” according to new court documents seen by Variety.
Harry, who is also known as the Duke of Sussex, launched the lawsuit earlier this year after the Mail on Sunday reported on another lawsuit in which he is embroiled, involving the British government. Harry is applying for a judicial review against the U.K. Home Office in a bid to force them to provide official security for himself, his wife Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, and their children Archie and Lilibet.
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The Sussexes, who have indicated they are willing to pay for the security themselves, have claimed security fears are a reason that they have not been able to return to the U.K. with their children in a personal capacity.
The latest lawsuit relates to two Mail on Sunday articles covering Harry’s case against the Home Office, which he claims implied he was lying over his offer to pay for his security privately.
The lawsuit also suggests the articles “manipulate[d] and confuse[d] public opinion” against the prince by referring to his use of “spin doctors” that were authorized by him to “put out false and misleading statements about his willingness to pay for police protection”; and also insinuated that Harry had tried to keep his suit against the Home Office a secret.
Harry claims that these suggestions “are self-evidently exceptionally serious and damaging” because they “constitute an attack on his honesty and integrity and undermine his fitness to be involved both in charitable and philanthropic work in general, and in efforts to tackle online misinformation in particular (through the Archewell Foundation).”
The prince, who has been in the Netherlands this week overseeing the Invictus Games, a tournament he founded as a Paralympic-style athletics event for armed services personnel, is asking the court to grant him aggravated damages for libel, an injunction to prevent them from publishing the stories or similar stories again, and an order that the Mail on Sunday publishes the court’s judgment.
Both Harry and Meghan have been involved in a number of legal battles agains the press in recent years, including another case against the Mail on Sunday earlier this year. Even Archie, who turns three years old next month, has filed his first lawsuit, having been a joint claimant along with his mother in a suit against photo agency Splash News. The suit was settled in December 2020.
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