Earlier today, Prince Harry received devastating news. Four years after initially filing, the former senior royal, in addition to several other high-profile figures, lost their landmark privacy lawsuit against Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), publisher of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. 

The lawsuit, which officially began on October 6, 2022, accused ANL of unlawful information gathering and breaches of privacy, claiming the tabloid group hired private investigators to hack phone calls, tap cars, and illicitly obtain financial and medical records between 1993 and 2011.

The verdict was announced in a 400-page judgment by the High Court this morning. In it, the court stated the “claimants failed to prove their pleaded allegations… the claims are therefore dismissed,” per The Guardian.

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Now, Harry has spoken out. In a joint statement with fellow claimant Baroness Doreen Lawrence on Tuesday, July 7, they broke their silence on the decision.

“We came to Court seeking justice and accountability,” the statement read, per People. “But we have received neither.”

“This judgment represents a complete reversal of the position which previous Judges have taken in relation to the hacking claims successfully brought against both News Group Newspapers and Mirror Group Newspapers (who were represented by, at the time, the Judge who made this decision),” the statement continued. “Generic findings about various private investigators that were held by the Courts in these parallel claims to have carried out unlawful activity at the very same time in relation to similar stories and well-known individuals have been wholly ignored. The fact that this Court has chosen to dismiss them represents an inconsistency which is hard to understand or reconcile with common sense, or the evidence heard in the courtroom itself.”

“It is a complete and obvious whitewash, but sadly not altogether unexpected,” the statement continued. “However, the lengths to which the Court has gone to exonerate the Mail is as shocking as it is totally unwarranted.”

The statement then addressed the reason for the decision head-on. “When the Court says there is not sufficient evidence of wrongdoing, despite the documents showing otherwise, then one does wonder how justice was ever going to be achieved,” they continued.

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The statement then listed a few of the pieces of evidence submitted, including a tape of a private investigator admitting to tricking Lawrence, and a journalist who admitted using a private investigator to secure “highly sensitive medical information (that even the Mail was too worried to publish).”

“It feels here like one rule for the newspapers and another for the claimants,” the statement continued. “While the Claimants presented evidence, Mail journalists simply gave denials, and the Court chose uncritically to believe them, even in the face of inconsistencies, contradictions and blatant untruths that were obvious to neutral observers in Court when compared to the documents.”

“We presented to the Court evidence which we believed was compelling at the time and remains so now,” the statement ended. “We would like to thank our legal team for all their hard work and all the witnesses who were brave enough to come forward in the pursuit of justice.”

The Court loss comes at an important time for Harry. He is currently on a five-day trip to London to support charities and celebrate the one-year kickoff to his veteran sporting event, The Invictus Games.