Prince Harry on Tuesday said he had suffered a lifelong “press invasion” and accused some media of having blood on their hands, as he became the first royal in more than 100 years to give evidence in court.
Harry, 38, said he had been the victim of relentless and distressing media intrusion “most of my life up until this day” and attacked negative portrayals of him as the “spare to the heir”.
“How much more blood will stain their typing fingers before someone can put a stop to this madness,” the younger son of King Charles III added in a witness statement.
“You’re then either the ‘playboy prince’, the ‘failure’, the ‘dropout’ or, in my case, the ‘thicko’, the ‘cheat’, the ‘underage drinker’, the ‘irresponsible drug taker’, the list goes on.
“As a teenager and in my early 20s, I ended up feeling as though I was playing up to a lot of the headlines and stereotypes that they wanted to pin on me… It was a downward spiral,” he said, calling the reporting “utterly vile”.
Harry is accusing Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) Ltd, Publisher of The Mirror, Sunday Mirror and the Sunday People tabloids of illegal information gathering, including phone hacking.
During cross examination by MGN’s lawyer Andrew Green, Harry admitted that he had no recollection of reading the majority of the articles he had complained about.
But he called them “incredibly invasive” and taken as a whole they had made him acutely paranoid and ruined his relationships.
Prince Harry says, claims he boasted in his new book about killing 25 Taliban fighters while on duty in Afghanistan are a “dangerous lie”.
According to the report, Prince has been criticized for discussing killings in Spare, with some military figures saying it was wrong to refer to the dead as “chess pieces”.
But on US TV, Harry accused the press of taking his words out of context and said the spin endangered his family.
He also defended his remarks, saying he had wanted to reduce veteran suicide.
Spare, which was published on Tuesday, has become the fastest-selling non-fiction book ever in the UK.
Some 400,000 copies of the memoir have been bought, despite many excerpts being leaked in the press ahead of its official release.
In a wide-ranging interview with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show – the first conducted after details from the book were published – Harry suggested there had been attempts to undermine his book, spoke of his fractured relationship with his brother, and attacked the “bigoted” British press.
Harry said writing the book had been a “cathartic” experience and the “most vulnerable I have ever been in my life”, while also leaving him feeling stronger.
But he added: “The last few days have been hurtful and challenging, not being able to do anything about those leaks.”
In his condemnation of the media coverage, Harry claimed outlets had intentionally chosen to “strip away the context” of his account.
“Without a doubt, the most dangerous lie that they have told, is that I somehow boasted about the number of people I killed in Afghanistan,” he said.
“If I heard anyone boasting about that kind of thing, I would be angry. But it’s a lie.
“It’s really troubling and very disturbing that they can get away with it… My words are not dangerous – but the spin of my words are very dangerous to my family. That is a choice they’ve made.”
He said he had wanted to be honest about his experience in Afghanistan, and to give veterans the space to share their own “without any shame”.
“My whole goal and my attempt with sharing that detail is to reduce the number of [veteran] suicides,” he added.
Harry also claimed Buckingham Palace attempted to undermine the stories told in his memoir, assisted by the British press.
No names were mentioned but host Colbert asked if there had been attempts by the palace to undermine the book.
“Of course, and mainly by the British press,” he replied, without going into more detail.
In lighter moments during the interview, Harry drank Tequila with Colbert, joked that it felt like “group therapy” and performed a skit introducing the show with Hollywood actor Tom Hanks.
In Spare, Prince Harry reveals for the first time that he killed 25 enemy fighters during two tours in the Helmand region of Afghanistan.
“It wasn’t a statistic that filled me with pride but nor did it make me ashamed,” he writes.
“When I was plunged into the heat and confusion of battle, I didn’t think about those as 25 people. You can’t kill people if you see them as people.
“In truth, you can’t hurt people if you see them as people. They were chess pieces taken off the board, bad guys eliminated before they kill good guys.”
Subsequent media coverage of the comments, which were leaked to the press ahead of the book’s publication, drew criticism from figures in the military.
Ex-army officer Col Richard Kemp, who oversaw forces in Afghanistan, told the BBC he was concerned at references to dead Taliban insurgents as chess pieces, saying such descriptions could give “propaganda to the enemy”.
And Ex-colonel Tim Collins, who gained worldwide fame for an eve-of battle speech to troops in Iraq, said: “He has badly let the side down. We don’t do notches on the rifle butt. We never did.”
Prince Harry has claimed that his brother Prince William physically attacked him, according to the Guardian, which says it has seen a copy of the duke’s upcoming memoir, Spare.
The newspaper reported that the book sets out an argument between the pair over Prince Harry’s wife Meghan.
“He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor,” the Guardian quotes Prince Harry as writing.
BBC News has not seen a copy of Spare.
The memoir will not be published until next Tuesday, but the Guardian said it obtained a copy amid what it called “stringent pre-launch security”.
Buckingham Palace has yet to respond to a request for comment.
According to the Guardian, the book says the row was sparked by comments Prince William made to Prince Harry at his London home in 2019.
Prince Harry, the paper says, writes that his brother was critical of his marriage to Meghan Markle – and that Prince William described her as “difficult”, “rude” and “abrasive”.
The Duke of Sussex reportedly writes that his brother was “parrot[ing] the press narrative” as the confrontation escalated.
Prince Harry is said to describe what happened next, including an alleged physical altercation.
“He set down [a glass of] water, called me another name, then came at me. It all happened so fast. So very fast.
“He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor.
“I landed on the dog’s bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me. I lay there for a moment, dazed, then got to my feet and told him to get out.”
Martin Pengelly, a journalist for the Guardian’s US website who wrote its story, said he did not approach Prince William’s communication team.
The reporter said that his article is “a report on Harry’s book, which he’s written, it’s Harry’s account”.
Mr Pengelly told BBC Radio 5 Live: “We carefully, obviously in reporting it, didn’t call it a fight because Harry says he didn’t fight back.”
Prince Harry writes that his brother urged him to hit back and he refused to do so, according to the Guardian, but Prince William later looked “regretful, and apologised”.
Photographs suggest Prince Harry regularly wore a dark necklace at events such as the Invictus Games, and on foreign tours with Meghan, as recently as September 2019.
While publishers at Penguin Random House are yet to confirm whether the leaked excerpts from the book are genuine, Prince Harry has recently spoken of his troubled relationship with his brother.
In the couple’s Harry and Meghan Netflix documentary, Prince Harry describes a meeting he attended with his brother, and father, the now King.
Prince Harry described the conference in early 2020, which was also attended by the late Queen, as “terrifying”.
“It was terrifying to have my brother scream and shout at me and my father say things that just simply weren’t true, and my grandmother quietly sit there and sort of take it all in,” he said.
The Guardian says Prince Harry details a meeting with Charles, then Prince of Wales, and Prince William after the funeral of his grandfather, Prince Phillip, in April 2021.
According to the paper, Prince Harry writes his father stood between him and Prince William, and said “please, boys, don’t make my final years a misery”.
In a trailer for a sit-down interview, which will be broadcast on 8 January ahead of the book release, the prince said: “I would like to get my father back, I would like to have my brother back”.
However, Prince Harry told ITV’s Tom Bradby “they’ve shown absolutely no willingness to reconcile,” although it was not clear who he was referring to.
Buckingham Palace declined to comment on this.
Spare, ghostwritten by memoirist JR Moehringer and part of a multi-million dollar book deal, was previously believed to be subject to the utmost secrecy with few details known about its content.
“For Harry, this is his story at last,” Penguin Random House said in a publicity statement back in October.
“With its raw, unflinching honesty, Spare is a landmark publication full of insight, revelation, self-examination, and hard-won wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief.”
