Murdoch firm ‘paid secret phone-hacking settlement to Prince William’
Rupert Murdoch’s media business secretly paid Prince William a “very large sum of money” to quietly settle a phone-hacking claim, according to new court filings.
The Prince of Wales received the previously undisclosed payment in 2020 after bringing a legal claim against the owner of the Sun and the News of the World.
Details of the settlement were given in legal documents submitted by his brother, Prince Harry, as part of his own legal battle with the publisher, which returns to the high court on Tuesday.
Harry told the court his attempts to seek an apology from Murdoch’s company over phone hacking were carried out with the approval of his grandmother the late Queen Elizabeth II.
The royal claims there was a secret agreement struck between royal family and “senior executives” at Murdoch’s company at some point before 2012. As part of this supposed deal the princes would delay legal proceedings against the newspaper group in return for receiving an apology at a later date.
Harry said the royal family did this after being scarred by the “Tampongate” incident when the Sun obtained a recorded phone call between Prince Charles and Camilla while the couple were having an affair in the 1980s.
Harry said the royal family was desperate to avoid a repeat of this coverage. The filings state: “The reason for this was to avoid the situation where a member of the royal family would have to sit in the witness box and recount the specific details of the private and highly sensitive voicemails that had been intercepted by [the News of the World royal reporter] Clive Goodman.
“The institution was incredibly nervous about this and wanted to avoid at all costs the sort of reputational damage that it had suffered in 1993 when the Sun and another
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