After car chase, Prince Harry’s long feud with media comes to the U.S.
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LONDON — To understand how rattled Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, may have been when pursued this week in New York City by photographers, it is important to recall that Harry believes paparazzi caused the car wreck that killed his mother, Princess Diana, when he was 12 years old.
Everything flows from that event — and from Harry’s stated fear of “history repeating itself” for himself, his wife and children.
On Tuesday night, after an award ceremony at a New York City ballroom, a spokeswoman for the couple said “highly aggressive paparazzi” chased a vehicle transporting Harry, Meghan and Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland.
The spokeswoman said the chase lasted two hours and was nearly “catastrophic.” A spokesperson for the New York Police Department said the presence of many photographers made the couple’s transport “challenging,” adding that Harry and Meghan arrived at their destination safely without any collisions or injuries.
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A photo agency, Backgrid, that worked with freelance photographers at the scene, said “there were no near-collisions or near-crashes during this incident … The photographers have reported feeling that the couple was not in immediate danger at any point.”
Ken Wharfe, a former bodyguard for Princess Diana and her then two young sons, said the episode in New York appeared to be “badly organized, badly planned.”
“There seemed to be chaos when they were leaving the hotel,” he told The Washington Post. “There was no delineation of barriers. Press were free to roam where they want. … The journey got off to a bad start.”
Wharfe said if he had been there, he would have advised Harry and Meghan to pose briefly for photographs before they left. “All the paparazzi want is a photograph,” he said. “They aren’t out to kill people.”
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But for Harry, after a lifetime marked by constant contact with the paparazzi, and with the fate of his mother so dominant in his worldview, the intentions of the press remain highly suspect.
He is currently waging three separate legal battles in British courts against the publishers of three of the largest tabloids in Britain — the Daily Mail, the Mirror and the Sun — over his claims that the publications hacked his phones and invaded his privacy.
His civil lawsuit against the parent company of the Mirror is underway, and the fifth-in-line to the throne could appear in the witness box early next month.
When Harry married biracial American Meghan Markle, many Brits hoped they would help modernize the British monarchy. But now, estranged from the royal family, Harry has said his mission in life is to change tabloid culture, which he believes not only pollutes the lives of media consumers but contributed to his family rift.
Harry “sincerely believes himself to be on a quest to clean up the British press,” said Alan Rusbridger, who edited the Guardian for 20 years and now runs Prospect magazine. He said there is almost an endless appetite for stories and photos about Harry and Meghan, and while “it’s not open season on Harry and Meghan, it’s almost open season on Harry and Meghan.”
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“[Harry] genuinely has suffered a lot of intrusion, and you can understand why he feels angry, you don’t need much empathy to understand that whatever happened in New York is bound to be upsetting to him,” he said.
In his memoir, “Spare,” Harry wonders aloud why the paparazzi who pursued his mother into a Paris tunnel in 1997 weren’t arrested. “Why were those paps not more roundly blamed?” he asks. “Who sent them? And why were they not in jail?”
In 1999, a French judge investigating the high-speed crash assigned sole responsibility to her drunk driver and not the photographers pursuing them.
The prince’s disgust with the media has been further fueled by what he considers targeted harassment, with racist overtones, in the coverage of his wife.
He blamed the Daily Mail for Meghan suffering a miscarriage. He said the British tabloids illegally gathered information on him and ruined his relationship with previous girlfriends.
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When British TV personality Jeremy Clarkson wrote in the Sun tabloid that he dreamed Meghan would be “made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her,” Harry spoke out, describing the piece as “hurtful and cruel” and suggesting that it encouraged the mistreatment of women. The British public largely backed the prince. The Sun withdrew the column, a response that appeared to be unprecedented.
In “Spare,” Harry writes of the damage done “all because a dreadful mob of dweebs and crones and cut-rate criminals and clinically diagnosable sadists along Fleet Street feel the need to get their jollies and plump their profits and work out their personal issues by tormenting one very large, very ancient, very dysfunctional family.”
In many ways, Harry’s fight with his family is all about media. Harry charges that the PR teams working for his brother, Prince William, his stepmother, Queen Camilla, and his father, King Charles III, actively offered negative stories about him and Meghan in exchange for better coverage for themselves.
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His family members have not responded to those allegations.
The prince said on ITV that changing the media “may be incredibly hard, and I don’t know how long it is going to take, but it is 100 percent worth it.” He added that he is “happy with them talking crap about me every single day, because I know it is not true, but what I draw the line at is when you are inciting hatred on myself and on my wife and on my children.”
He hopes to force change through the courts.
In his case against the publisher of the Daily Mirror, where he is expected to take the stand, Harry alleges that his voice mails were hacked and other information illegally obtained between 1996 and 2011. He scored an early win in the trial when the publisher admitted to unlawfully gathering information on him in one instance. But the publisher denies that the paper hacked his phone and argues that the case shouldn’t go forward because too much time has passed.
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Harry is also suing Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper group, News Group Newspapers, for unlawful acts — including hacking his voice mails — that he alleges were committed from 1994 until 2016. In court documents in that case, Harry claimed there was a secret settlement between Murdoch’s company and Prince William.
And he is suing the publisher of the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday for alleged phone hacking and misuse of private information. Harry showed up for a pretrial hearing at the High Court in London in March — something he didn’t need to do, but it underscored how seriously he is taking the case. The publishers deny the allegations.
Matt Walsh, head of the School of Journalism at Cardiff University in Wales, said Harry’s lawsuits against the tabloids are unlikely to set new legal precedents in Britain, as much of the behavior that the prince alleges in his civil lawsuits is already illegal — meaning you can’t hack someone’s phone.
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It is legal for a photographer take photographs in public places, Walsh points out. It is against the law for them to drive recklessly or cause collisions.
Rusbridger, the former Gurdian editor, said the attitude of British paparazzi is “‘we will take the pictures and pay later if we have to.’ It’s such a lucrative market that if you get fined five years later, you take it on the chin.”
Walsh predicted that Harry’s appearance in court will garner global headlines. “Whenever the royals have become involved in court cases, they never give evidence,” he said. “They never, ever appear in court.”
Harry and his lawyers could embarrass the tabloids. He could win a substantial settlement — or not. He could win in the court of public opinion — or not.
Walsh said that the prince, unlike other plaintiffs, has the money and the motivation not to settle out of court.
“This is part of his life’s work,” Walsh said. “He feels it to be his duty to stop the press being as intrusive and as aggressive as they are into the private lives of the rich and famous.”
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Source: The Washington Post
