Prince Harry loses legal battle against Daily Mail publisher as top U.K. court dismisses all claims

London — Britain’s Prince Harry has lost his long-running legal battle against the publisher of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday tabloid newspapers, according to court documents seen by CBS News on Tuesday. All claims were thrown out by the court in what is widely expected to be the last of the prince’s courtroom battles against British media outlets.

Harry, the Duke of Sussex, was among several claimants in the case — along with pop star Elton John and actor Elizabeth Hurley — who accused the publisher of the popular tabloids, Associated Newspapers (ANL), of unlawfully gathering information about them through methods such as phone tapping, intercepting voicemails and impersonating people to obtain personal information.

In its ruling on Tuesday, the U.K. High Court dismissed the claims, saying they could not be proven.

Lawyers for Harry and the other claimants said the alleged acts took place between 1993 and 2011, but that the behavior continued into 2018.

ANL had previously denied wrongdoing by its journalists, calling the allegations “preposterous” and saying the 50 or so articles cited in the lawsuit were all based on information gathered lawfully through people close to the claimants. ANL had argued for the case to be thrown out because of the amount of time that had passed since the alleged transgressions.

At the beginning of the lawsuit in January, Harry said press snooping had made him “paranoid beyond belief.” 

Last year, the publisher of The Sun newspaper paid the duke “substantial damages” in an out-of-court settlement and profusely apologized for the methods it had used.

In 2023, Harry won 15 of 33 claims of phone hacking in a lawsuit against Mirror Group Newspapers. The judge awarded Harry around $180,000 in damages, and the following year the publisher paid him a further $370,000 to settle his other claims against the group.

Tuesday’s ruling came during a rare visit by Harry to the U.K., after intense speculation about whether he would bring his wife Meghan and their two children, Archie and Lilibet, who did not end up traveling with him. The prince engaged in a public back-and-forth with Buckingham Palace over where he stays in his home country and the level of security that would be afforded to him and his family, if they were to join him on British soil.

Harry has long blamed the news media for the death of his mother Princess Diana, who died in a car crash in a Paris tunnel in 1997 while being chased by press photographers.

He has also cited media attacks on Meghan as one of the main reasons behind their decision to abandon their roles as senior, working members of the royal family and move to the U.S. in 2020.