Attorneys opposing Prince Harry have accused him of deliberately destroying evidence by deleting messages to the ghostwriter of his memoir, Spare. The Prince is suing British tabloid newspaper The Sun, and a judge recently ordered him to explain why text messages and files that could be relevant to the case were deleted from his phone or destroyed after he filed the lawsuit against the paper.
Mr. Justice Timothy Fancourt said many “potentially relevant documents” were contained within communications between the Prince and the writer, adding that Harry was “not transparently clear about what happened.”
However, the Duke of Sussex’s attorney said online chat between the men was deleted because it contained “highly sensitive information.”
The Prince filed the suit in 2019, accusing the Rupert Murdoch-owned News Group Newspapers of illegally gathering information by hacking his phone. It came immediately after his American wife, Meghan Markle, launched legal proceedings against the Daily Mail for publishing a private letter she wrote to her father.
The UK’s notorious tabloid press has previously been the center of a series of phone hacking scandals, including one that shut down the popular News of the World publication in 2011.
The News of the World closed when it emerged that its reporters had hacked the phone of Milly Dowler, a teenage girl murdered by serial killer Levi Bellfield. Milly vanished from a bus stop near her home in Surrey in 2002. During their investigations, Scotland Yard detectives discovered that reporters had accessed the dead girl’s voicemail service and deleted a series of messages to make room for more. The deletions initially prompted investigators and Milly’s family to believe she was still alive. Dowler’s parents eventually won a multi-million dollar settlement, but the newspaper never recovered.
Almost ten years after her disappearance, serial killer Levi Bellfield was convicted of Milly Dowler’s murder while already serving a life sentence without parole for separate killings. Bellfield murdered three other women in London and is suspected of killing several more.
