Prince Harry's Biggest Claim in His Privacy Case Just Got Debunked — And It Wasn't Even About Him
Prince Harry had submitted 14 Daily Mail articles in court in his highly-publicised case that he unfortunately lost on Tuesday.
In 2022, Prince Harry took Associated Newspapers, the publishers of the Daily Mail, to court for unlawful information gathering. The case went to trial this year, and after four years of legal battle, the Duke of Sussex unfortunately lost on Tuesday. Justice Nichlin believed the claimants, including Harry, couldn’t prove their claims. While the loss of the high-stakes case is certainly a setback, his biggest privacy-breach claim, debunked by the court, wasn’t even about him.
Harry had submitted 14 articles published in the Daily Mail between 2001 and 2013 and had claimed they were based on information gathered through unlawful methods. He had accused Associated Newspapers of intercepting voicemails and “blagging” private details. The majority of the submitted articles were about his relationship with his then on-and-off girlfriend, Chelsy Davy. The Duke claimed that Caroline Graham and Barbara Jones had obtained Davy’s identity by offering payment to a British Airways employee for the article titled ‘Harry Besotted with Chelsy, his first true love’ published in 2004. However, the claim did not hold up in court.
In his ruling, Justice Nichlin said that after “considering all the evidence,” he was not “persuaded” that the claimants had proved “the pleaded case on this Article”. He further added, “I accept Ms. Briley’s evidence that the correct spelling of Chelsy Davy’s name was not obtained from British Airways, but ultimately from the ranch contacts as described in the evidence. I also accept Ms Jones’ evidence that, once she had the correct name and the relevant family background, she located Ms Davy in Cape Town by conventional means. The claim in relation to this Article therefore fails.”
Another sensational article published by the Daily Mail, ‘It’s the Army or me’ in 2005, detailed a conversation between Harry and Davy, where the latter gave the prince an ultimatum that he should give up his plans of joining the army if he wanted to spend more time with her. The Duke had reportedly called her from the costume rental shop, ahead of his Nazi-outfit debacle, and Davy had supported the choice of attire. She had also called the Army a “pointless” career and called him a “wuss” for letting himself be grounded after the PR crisis. She had reportedly angrily called him because he couldn’t visit her in South Africa due to family pressure. Harry had claimed that these talks were between him and Davy, and the material in the article was personal and highly sensitive.
However, Judge Nichlin said, “ I am not satisfied that Prince Harry has proved, on the balance of probabilities, that the information in this Article was obtained by UIG or was unlawfully corroborated,” further adding, “Although the Article plainly contained information of a private character, privacy alone does not prove unlawful acquisition. The burden remains on a claimant to establish, on the balance of probabilities, an article-specific route by which UIG occurred.”
This ruling on the Davy article gets to the heart of why Harry's case failed more broadly. It wasn't that the judge doubted these were real, private conversations between Harry and Davy; he accepted that much. The issue was that Harry's legal team depended on the sheer intimacy of the details, like a private ultimatum over his Army career or a heated call about his Nazi costume controversy, as proof enough that someone had broken the law to get them. The court disagreed, ruling that private information can sometimes reach a newspaper through legitimate means, like a source close to the couple. Since Harry couldn't pinpoint the specific illegal method used for this article, it became one of several examples the judge cited in dismissing the wider case.
Davy was not the only ex-girlfriend mentioned in the submitted articles. News pieces about Cressida Bonas, Laura Gerard-Leigh, and Natalie Pinkham were also filed. Apart from romantic angles, articles covering Harry’s conversations with his brother, Prince William, about their mother, Princess Diana, were also submitted in court.
