Prince Harry received just a fraction of the reported £10 million ($12.5 million) settlement he reached with Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers (NGN), with “75 percent” going towards his costs, and a smaller chunk to his co-defendant, Tom Watson, a source with knowledge of the matter has told The Daily Beast.
Harry’s team has consistently emphasized that the “full and unequivocal” apology to Harry and his mother and NGN’s admission of criminality at the Sun were the critical factors in his decision.
Immediately after the trial, it was widely reported that Harry had walked away with an “eight-figure” settlement, suggesting he had received more than £10 million (around $12 million). While some reports noted that he would have to pay legal costs, some British media, notably that portion of it that tends to be hyper-critical of Harry, characterized the deal as Harry being bought off by the prospect of pocketing a handsome “profit.”
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In fact, that is very far from the truth. The Daily Beast can now reveal that after costs, Harry could have received as little as £2 million ($2.5 million)—thought to be just a million pounds more than the sum his brother, Prince William, received from NGN in a secret 2020 deal to resolve his phone hacking claims.
A source with knowledge of the deal told The Daily Beast that “any sum being speculated on was a total sum and includes damages and costs for the two cases (Sussex and Watson) and a majority (in the region of 75%) of the total figure is provided to cover legal costs.”
Prince Harry and NGN both declined to comment. However, the revelation that Harry received a relatively paltry sum after costs may actually bolster the argument widely made by those close to him and his supporters: that what Harry really cared about was NGN’s admission of criminal activity at the Sun, which it has always denied.
Both News Group Newspapers and Harry’s office declined to comment to The Daily Beast, and the terms of the deal are confidential.
However, sources sympathetic to Harry said that NGN’s admission of guilt was the pivotal factor in Harry accepting their offer and pointed to an article in the magazine Prospect, which said NGN’s settlement looked like “a desperate last-minute move by a publisher anxious to avoid a public trial of the claims.”
The case was settled last month after frantic last-minute negotiations between Harry and NGN. The chaos was complicated by the eight-hour time difference between Montecito and London, which saw lawyers inform the presiding judge they were having trouble reaching (presumably sleeping) Harry.
NGN eventually made an unprecedented “full and unequivocal” apology to Harry and to his late mother, Diana, and admitted for the first time that illegal information-gathering methods had been used at the flagship Murdoch newspaper, the Sun. Previously, NGN had only admitted illegal methods at the now-shuttered News of the World (with all malfeasance attributed to that paper.)
However, NGN notably did not admit to a cover-up in the statement, thereby protecting former NGN executive Will Lewis, now Jeff Bezos’ CEO at the Washington Post. Lewis was in charge of cleaning up the phone hacking mess and was alleged to have been closely involved in deleting an astonishing 30 million emails from NGN servers.
One legal source told The Daily Beast: “The amount of damages was actually settled a week before the case opened, what delayed it was the accountability issue. Harry wanted senior NGN executives who he alleged were involved in hacking and the cover up to be named but that was never going to happen.
“In the end what NGN did, which was a very clever piece of lawyering, was to admit to wrongdoing that was already widely known about, and not admit to the cover-up.
“Harry’s side has put together a file for the police about the cover-up but [a prosecution] is never going to happen because it was a long time ago and unlawful news gathering has now stopped. Millions of police hours have been spent on this and the police need to get on to ‘now’ problems —such as young men being radicalized in their bedrooms—as opposed to historic matters seen as basically affecting Prince Harry.”
William’s settlement with NGN only became public when it was referred to as a “secret” deal in paperwork Prince Harry filed as part of his own suit.
Harry said in the lawsuit at the time: “My brother appeared to know an awful lot more than I did on the subject of phone hacking although he did not tell me if that was the case. However, NGN still settled his claim for a huge sum of money in 2020… the public being told, and seemingly with some favorable deal in return for him going ‘quietly’ so to speak. This goes to prove the existence of this secret agreement between the institution and senior executives at NGN—if it wasn’t in place then why on earth did William wait until 2019 to bring his claim in circumstances where our two private secretaries brought and settled claims back in 2012, and where he knew far more about the matter back then than I did.”
While the exact amount William received has never been formally disclosed, Tortoise Media, run by a former NGN executive, has suggested it was around £1 million ($1.25 million).
