Prince Harry and other celebrities, including singer Elton John and actress Elizabeth Hurley, have filed an appeal after losing a lawsuit they brought against the owner of the Daily Mail, Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), their lawyer announced Friday.
A High Court judge dismissed the case in July against the youngest son of King Charles III and the other plaintiffs, finding that they had failed to prove that the tabloid had collected information about them illegally, in particular by intercepting voice messages or listening to telephone conversations for articles published between 1993 and 2018.
“We confirm that the plaintiffs have today filed with the Court of Appeal a request for authorization to appeal the judgments rendered” in their trial against ANL as well as the amount of compensation they must pay to the publisher of the “Daily Mail,” a spokesperson for the Sheridans law firm told AFP.
They believe that these decisions are “tainted by errors, both in law and in fact,” he added.
The other personalities associated with this appeal are the actress Sadie Frost, the husband of Elton John – David Furnish – as well as Doreen Lawrence, mother of Stephen Lawrence, whose murder in 1993 shocked the United Kingdom, and today a member of the House of Lords.
In July, after a trial lasting more than two months, Prince Harry denounced a “shocking” and “inconsistent” judgment.
ANL for its part hailed “an overwhelming victory for the Daily Mail and its journalists, as well as for press freedom in general.”
At the end of August, a High Court judge ordered the plaintiffs to pay initial compensation of 9.5 million pounds to ANL. The total amount was to be determined later.
This procedure is the last brought by Harry, who has been leading a legal crusade for several years against the powerful British tabloid press, which he considers partly responsible for the death of his mother Diana in 1997 in Paris, and which he accuses of having mistreated his wife, the former American actress Meghan Markle.
The Duke of Sussex – his official title – thus obtained in December 2023 the conviction of the publishing company of the “Daily Mirror”. And in January 2025, he reached a financial agreement, for an undisclosed amount, with the owner of the Sun.
Harry returned at the end of August to live in the United Kingdom with his wife and their two children, Archie and Lilibet, six years after leaving the country, at odds with the royal family, to live in California.
