Prince Harry drops libel suit against 'Daily Mail'

Prince Harry has withdrawn his defamation suit the Daily Mailone of several lawsuits filed by the former king against British tabloids.

The libel case arose out of an article by him Daily Mail which was published in February 2022 and questioned the Duke of Sussex's efforts to maintain publicly funded protection from the British government despite his much-publicized split from the royal family.

However, Prince Harry – who has also filed lawsuits over phone hacking allegations against British publishers including Rupert Murdoch's News Group Newspapers and the Mirror Group – suffered a setback in his defamation action against Associated Newspapers Ltd after a judge ruled in December that Harry's legal team had failed to prove its case before trial, with Harry ordered to pay the publisher's £50,000 legal costs, The Associated Press References.

Given the judge's initial ruling, Prince Harry's legal team told London's High Court that it withdrew the defamation suit before it went to trial.

In December, Prince Harry won his lawsuit against Mirror Group newspapers for inappropriately snooping on his private life after a judge was found that the publisher's documents — including The mirror, The Sunday Mirror, and The Sunday People — had engaged in “illegal intelligence-gathering” tactics, including hacking Harry's phone (or the phones of his associates) and tapping his voicemails. He was awarded £140,600 (about $178,000) in damages.

Harry is embroiled in similar lawsuits involving tabloid publishers. One case, against Rupert Murdoch-owned News Group Newspapers, will go to trial next year, although at a hearing in July a judge dismissed the phone hacking charges because they occurred outside the statute of limitations.