The prince is a talented witness.
The final time a royal was cross-examined in a British courtroom is believed to have been 1891, however that doesn’t seem like fazing Harry. He saved his cool and his focus, and dealt with powerful questions with poise.
“Would it be right to say you have a longstanding hostility toward the press because of its intrusion into your life?” he was requested at one level early within the listening to. “Yes, that is correct,” Prince Harry replied. Despite intense grilling from the Mirror Group’s lawyer, Andrew Green, Harry got here throughout as soft-spoken, measured, exact and unwilling to be drawn into hypothesis. At one level he regarded towards the choose, depth clear on his face and in his voice, as he spoke of the misery these tales had brought on.
His testimony was deeply private.
In his witness assertion, Harry complained that royal relations are solid in preordained roles by the tabloids. “You’re then either the ‘playboy prince’, the ‘failure,’ the ‘drop out’ or, in my case, the ‘thicko,’ the ‘cheat,’ the ‘underage drinker,’ ‘irresponsible drug taker,’ the list goes on,” he wrote.
This persona got here to overshadow his life, he mentioned. Whenever he entered a room, he “was facing judgments and opinions based on what had been reported about me, true or not.” When he was youthful, he mentioned, he “expected people to be thinking, ‘He’s obviously going to fail this test, because he’s a thicko.’”
Even when the information was optimistic, reminiscent of when he handed a army evaluation, there was a sting within the story. “It feels like the tabloids were looking to find any way to build me up and then knock me down at every chance they had.” Press intrusion, he mentioned, was “the main factor” for the top of his relationship with Chelsy Davy, a former girlfriend. More just lately, he mentioned, he and his spouse, Meghan, have “been subjected to a barrage of horrific personal attacks.”
