Prince Harry takes on Rupert Murdoch's UK tabloids in a high-stakes trial

London: Prince Harry will get his long-awaited day in court against Rupert Murdoch's British tabloids Monday, as his lawsuit against News Group Newspapers for unlawful gathering of private information finally goes on trial in London.

Harry is not expected to take the stand for at least the first two weeks of the trial, which will be devoted to "generic issues" relating to the practices of the papers from the 1990s to the early 2010s, when lawyers say their reporters routinely hacked the prince's cellphone and those of other celebrities to dig up intimate details.

The hearings could nonetheless prove damaging to Murdoch and several of his former lieutenants. Lawyers for Harry, 40, the younger son of King Charles III, will set out to show that the News Group executives concealed and sought to destroy evidence of hacking and other improper practices.

Harry is one of only two plaintiffs left from an original group of about 40; the rest, including actor Hugh Grant, have settled with News Group. The other plaintiff, who is also scheduled to take the stand, is Tom Watson, a former deputy leader of the Labour Party, who alleges that News Group hacked his phone and targeted him for political reasons.

Harry has so far refused to settle, casting his suit as a last chance to hold the British press to account for one of its darkest periods. In addition to hacking phones, the tabloids hired private detectives and encouraged journalists to lie and misrepresent themselves to gain access to highly personal data.

"One of the main reasons for seeing this through is accountability, because I am the last person that can actually achieve that," Harry said last month in an interview at The New York Times' DealBook Summit.

He acknowledged that any settlement might not compensate him for his legal costs, and that with News Group aggressively seeking to settle its remaining litigation out of court, it was not clear whether any cases would follow his.

Still, the prospect of multiple days of testimony by the prince, who left Britain for Southern California in part because of what he said was the relentless press intrusion into his life, guarantees a riveting spectacle.

Harry has testified once before, in June 2023 in a hacking case against Mirror Group Newspapers. At the time, he was the first senior member of the royal family to take the stand in court since 1891, when Queen Victoria's eldest son, Prince Albert Edward, testified about wrongdoing during a game of baccarat at which he was present.

Timothy Fancourt, the judge in the 2023 case as well as the current one, ruled that Harry had been a victim of "widespread and habitual hacking," and awarded him 1,40,600 pounds ($1,71,600). Harry settled the remainder of his privacy claims against the Mirror Group for at least 400,000 pounds.

Lawyers involved in previous hacking cases said Harry was taking a risk in exposing himself to several days of cross-examination. He is citing 30 articles that span a period from 1996 to 2011, some of which asserted that he was a regular drug user. His lawyer, David Sherborne, said that was not true.

If Harry continues to reject any settlement offer from News Group, under English law he is at risk of paying substantial legal costs if the court does not award him a commensurate amount at the end of the trial. While a last-minute settlement is still possible, lawyers said he seemed intent on airing his charges in open court.

"Harry appears to have reconciled himself that this is a price worth paying for getting to what he believes is the truth," said Daniel Taylor, a media lawyer in London who has represented other former plaintiffs in the case. "His overriding imperative is to take the matter to trial in order to expose what he believes is their egregious wrongdoing."

That, in turn, raises the stakes for Murdoch's former associates. Among those who could come under unwelcome scrutiny is Will Lewis, a former News executive who helped manage the company's response to the hacking scandal in 2010 and 2011 and is currently the publisher of The Washington Post.

Lawyers for Harry say Lewis was part of a scheme to conceal evidence of hacking by removing files from a computer belonging to Rebekah Brooks, the CEO of News UK. The files were transferred to a USB drive that either was lost or has not been opened because it was encrypted, according to a complaint submitted by the plaintiffs.

News Group has said Brooks was questioned about deleting emails during her criminal trial in 2014 and was cleared of the charges. Lewis was never charged. He later was CEO of Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, before being named publisher of the Post in 2023.

"Any allegations of wrongdoing are untrue," Lewis said in a statement to The New York Times last June. "I have no further comment to make."

Lawyers for News Group argue that Harry is trying to turn the trial into a broader public inquiry into phone hacking. In May, Fancourt rejected a bid by Harry's lawyers to draw Murdoch into the case, saying, "There is a desire on the part of those running the litigation on the claimants' side to shoot at 'trophy' targets, whether those are political issues or high-profile individuals."

Murdoch, 93, testified before Britain's Parliament in 2011 that he should not be held personally responsible for hacking, given that he ran a global company with 53,000 employees. But he shut down News of the World, the tabloid most closely linked to hacking, and issued a contrite apology.

For Harry, Murdoch has remained an archnemesis. Harry and his older brother, William, have long held his tabloids, among others, responsible for the death of their mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, who was killed in a car accident in Paris in 1997 while being pursued by photographers.

In his memoir, "Spare," Harry described Murdoch's politics as being "just to the right of the Taliban's."

"I didn't like the harm he did each and every day to Truth, his wanton desecration of objective facts," Harry wrote. "I couldn't think of a single human being in the 300,000-year history of the species who'd done more damage to our collective sense of reality."