The publisher of the Daily Mail is being sued by a coterie of notable U.K. figures, led by Prince Harry and Elton John, with scandalous accusations of phone tapping, car burglaries, and bugging their homes.
The full list of plaintiffs includes the prince along with John and his husband David Furnish, actress Elizabeth Hurley, fashion designer Sadie Frost, and Baroness Doreen Lawrence, according to a press statement.
“These individuals have become aware of compelling and highly distressing evidence that they have been the victims of abhorrent criminal activity and gross breaches of privacy by Associated Newspapers,” Hamlins LLP, the law firm representing some of the group’s members, said in the statement.
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“We utterly and unambiguously refute these preposterous smears which appear to be nothing more than a pre-planned and orchestrated attempt to drag the Mail titles into the phone hacking scandal concerning articles up to 30 years old,” said the Mail’s publisher, Associated Newspapers, in a statement to The Daily Beast. “These unsubstantiated and highly defamatory claims—based on no credible evidence—appear to be simply a fishing expedition by claimants and their lawyers, some of whom have already pursued cases elsewhere.”
Some of the allegations include hiring private investigators to place recorders in homes and cars, paying off police officials for information, illegally impersonating people to get medical records, and improperly accessing financial records.
Prince Harry is notably the only British royal involved in the suit, and sources suggest the legal battle may nevertheless have serious repercussions for his family’s connections to the press.
“Harry and Meghan have frequently made it clear that they despised, and indeed almost considered corrupt, the sometimes cozy relationship between the palace and the British tabloid media. The palace were never willing to accede to Harry’s demands to blow that relationship up, so this feels like Harry doing it on his own,” a former Mail staffer told The Daily Beast. “Don’t forget that Charles recently hired a former senior editor at The Daily Mail as his communications chief. This is a shot right at the heart of the relationship between the palace and the media.”
The inclusion of Baronness Doreen Lawrence is notable due to the Mail’s 1997 front page that labeled five men suspected of killing her son as “murderers,” daring them to sue the paper if its allegations were wrong. Lawrence commended the paper at the time, and its public callout is credited with helping land the suspects in prison. The Mail’s editor at the time, Paul Dacre, is now the editor-in-chief of Associated Newspapers.
