Prince Harry says conflicts with the British press contributed to his rift with the royal family

In his first interview since winning a case against a U.K. tabloid, Prince Harry said his determination to fight the tabloids was a “central piece” in the breakdown of his relationship with his family.

Britain’s Prince Harry has attributed the rift between him and much of the royal family to his ongoing battles with the press.

When asked about the extent to which his fight with the tabloid press “destroyed the relationship with your family,” Harry responded, “I think that’s certainly a central piece to it,” according to a clip from an interview with Britain’s ITV News airing on Thursday.

“It’s a hard question to answer because anything I say about my family results in a torrent of abuse from the press,” he added.

In recent years, Prince Harry has filed three lawsuits against British tabloids. This interview marks his first public statement since his four-year battle with the Mirror Group Newspapers concluded with Britain’s High Court ruling in his favor. The court cited evidence of “widespread and habitual” use of phone hacking, hiring private investigators, and other methods to uncover details about Harry’s private life.

It seems as though they knew something before I even did,” Harry said, referring to a headline suggesting that his then-girlfriend Chelsy Davy was about to break up with him.

“Clearly a headline like that has no public interest whatsoever,” he stated, distinguishing between what is in the public interest and what merely interests the public.

Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, have previously blamed the media for driving the couple to announce their decision to “step back” from royal duties in 2020.

In 2022, a Netflix series focused on racism and the media’s treatment of Meghan, while also implicating Harry’s older brother, Prince William, the heir to the throne.

The couple accused the royal family of not only failing to support them but also engaging in a briefing war, where negative stories were supplied to the media to protect other royals or leaked to protect the palace in what Harry calls a “dirty game.”

According to royal watchers, Harry and William have employed different tactics for handling conflicts with the press as they balance their privacy with their roles as taxpayer-funded public figures, amid readers’ sometimes fervent demand for details about their lives.

The princes “express their contempt for the press in different ways,” royal author Tina Brown wrote in her 2022 book The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor — The Truth and the Turmoil.

“William with a grim, steely obsession with control; Harry with tortured, vocal, frequently ill-judged condemnation,” and a “never-ending flurry of lawsuits” against the media, Brown said.

In a previous interview with ITV, Harry mentioned that his father, King Charles, referred to his decision to take on the press as a “suicide mission.”

Court documents revealed in April 2023 showed that, in contrast to Harry’s high-profile lawsuits, William quietly received “a very large sum of money” in a 2020 settlement over phone hacking with News Group Newspapers, owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Prince Harry further stated that one of his motivations for the lawsuits was the press’s treatment of his late mother, Princess Diana, who died in a car crash while being pursued by paparazzi in 1997. He asserted that his mother was “probably” one of the earliest victims of phone hacking, although this has never been proven in court.

The interview is part of a new documentary on ITV, Tabloids on Trial, which will air in the United Kingdom on Thursday.

Prince Harry has two more civil cases making their way through the British courts, one against Associated Newspapers, which publishes the Daily Mail, and another against News UK, publisher of The Sun.