NGN made multiple settlement offers to Prince Harry, but Harry waited them out

I’m still on cloud nine because of Prince Harry’s unqualified victory. What a man! What a warrior! He spent years fighting News Group Newspapers and one of the most powerful media companies in the world. The trial, which was originally scheduled to start on Tuesday, was going to be a six-weeks-long affair which would have seen the Murdochs’ criminal empire put under a microscope. The Murdochs might have settled, but Harry got what he really wanted: an open and public admission that NGN was engaged in criminal activity for years, and a thorough apology to Harry and his late mother. Here’s the video of Harry’s lawyer David Sherborne making a statement outside of court today (this is the statement I included in the previous post).

What’s extremely notable to me is that Harry is still calling out NGN’s illegal activity. NGN’s apology is an on-the-record admission, not only of the crimes they committed but years of perjury and false statements in various situations. In essence, Harry is admitting that he took this further than anyone else could, but the rest of it must be done by the authorities, the police and politicians. And he’s right. This system of trying to fundamentally change the British press through civil litigation/out-of-court settlements was clearly not working.

NPR’s David Folkenflik – who has been covering this case for years – also reports something I long suspected, which is that NGN made multiple settlement overtures to Prince Harry and Tom Watson much earlier in the process, but the settlement offers never included an apology or acknowledgement of NGN’s wrongdoing. Basically, the only reason why Harry and Tom Watson agreed to the “massive” settlement this week is because NGN finally moved on the wording of the apology and admission.

Emma Jones, Hacked Off Board Director, spoke out following the settlement, saying: “It is now clear that the public and Parliament were lied to by the newspaper and its publisher, as part of the most extraordinary corporate cover up in living memory.” Tom Watson, the only co-plantiff left on the case with Prince Harry, also made his own statement via Twitter (see below). There are now widespread calls from media-watchdog groups, political groups and British citizens to force the government to truly investigate and prosecute NGN.

Update: People Magazine reports that the settlement “likely exceeded $12 million, covering damages in his case against the publisher over accusations of illegal information gathering by journalists and private investigators.” I was thinking that it would be much larger than that – surely it’s something more in the $20-30 million range, right?

Like every other person persecuted by News Group Newspapers, I wish they had left my family alone. But what happened, happened.

— Tom Watson (@tom_watson) January 22, 2025

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.