Prince Harry and Elton John notch a small but consequential win against a tabloid

A judge ruled Friday that a lawsuit brought by Prince Harry and other prominent British figures against the publisher of the Daily Mail tabloid can move forward, setting the stage for a major trial.

The Duke of Sussex, alongside six other claimants including singer Elton John and actors Elizabeth Hurley and Sadie Frost, accused Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL) of unlawful information-gathering. The allegations include bugging their homes and cars, tapping phone calls, illegally accessing their medical information from hospitals and financial data from banks, and bribing police officers for information.

ANL, which publishes the Daily Mail, MailOnline.com and Mail on Sunday, denied the allegations as “lurid” and “preposterous.” The publisher tried to get the case tossed at a preliminary hearing in March, but Justice Matthew Nicklin ruled that ANL “has not been able to deliver a ‘knockout blow’ to the claims of any of these Claimants.”

The ruling paves the way for a sensational trial against ANL, which had managed, unlike other tabloid publishers, to evade legal trouble for its allegedly unlawful tactics until now. As The Guardian reported in 2022:

Rival newspaper publishers, such as Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, have spent the last 15 years dealing with hundreds of claims of illegal activity at their newspapers, often relating to phone hacking or obtaining material illegally.

British tabloids have a reputation for being sordid and invasive, even dangerously reckless, particularly when it comes to reporting on celebrities and the royal family. In 2011, the Murdoch-owned rag News of the World shut down amid outrage over reports that its journalists hacked into the voicemail of a missing 13-year-old girl in 2002 and interfered with the police investigation into her disappearance.

The aggressive coverage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s relationship also led to intense criticism — in the U.K. and the U.S. — of the British tabloids’ toxicity and racism.

This ANL lawsuit aside, the couple’s legal battles with the British press continue. Markle won a suit against ANL in 2021 for publishing a private letter to her father. The pair has at least four other ongoing lawsuits against British publishers, one of which Harry testified for in June.