Murdoch’s News Corp offers Prince Harry settlement to resolve years-long lawsuit

LONDON — Rupert Murdoch’s British publishing arm has made a substantial settlement offer to Prince Harry and a senior lawmaker to avoid a lengthy trial over whether company executives had engaged in a coverup of illegal actions at his tabloids here.

Among the executives allegedly involved in that coverup is Will Lewis, now the CEO and publisher of the Washington Post. Lewis was a top Murdoch executive in the U.K. 14 years ago when a scandal over the tabloids’ hacking into people’s voice mails reached a fever pitch. He is not a defendant in the case, and has denied all wrongdoing. The claims against Lewis and the other executives have not been tested in court.

NPR was the first to break the news of the offer, disclosed by a person who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the case directly. A spokesperson for News UK, Murdoch’s British newspaper company, declined comment, as did a lawyer for Harry and the lawmaker, former member of the House of Commons Tom Watson.

The last-gasp settlement offer evoked Murdoch’s decision two years ago to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit against Fox News for broadcasting lies about the 2020 elections. Murdoch’s team made the offer on the cusp of trial — and of the nonagenarian media titan’s own testimony in open court. In that case, Fox made a modest admission that incorrect claims had been made, but Dominion Voting Systems was able to reveal the size of the settlement — the more telling concession.

As Harry and Watson’s cases have dragged on for years, the presiding judge in London, Justice Timothy Fancourt, seemed surprised that settlement talks would happen at the last minute.

“I didn’t form the view that there was anything in [the still-sealed court filings] that had not seen the light of day,” the judge told Anthony Hudson, Murdoch’s lead attorney. He also rebuked Hudson for asking to be heard in closed chambers to make his case privately.

“In this, of all cases, I’m not going to start having secret hearings,” the judge said.

The trial, should it take place, has been pushed off until Wednesday.

Harry and Watson have insisted on the need for acknowledgements of wrongdoing to settle their claims.

The size of damages is far smaller in British civil cases and settlements than in the U.S. Yet going through with this trial carries a financial risk for Harry and Watson: under British law, they can be forced to pay the defendant’s legal costs if they reject a settlement offer that exceeds the amount of the judgment awarded at trial.

A nationwide scandal lasting years

The British hacking scandal has dragged on for many years and involved many people, from the royal family to politicians, celebrities and even crime victims. News UK has paid more than $1.5 billion to settle more than 1,300 complaints against the Sunday paper News of the World and the daily tabloid The Sun. Murdoch personally apologized in July 2011 and shut down News of the World.

Even in reaching past settlements over the years, News UK has never admitted culpability for criminal activity by The Sun. Indeed, Murdoch expanded that paper to seven days a week in 2012, after closing News of the World the previous year.

As a result, he largely cauterized the damage and prevented the spread of public attention and criminal exposure to his other titles. News UK previously denied hacking into Watson’s voice mail messages and contended Harry’s legal claims were filed too late to be meaningful. It has vigorously denied its executives conducted any coverup.

Accusations of privacy invasions

Harry accuses the company’s journalists and private investigators of unlawfully gaining access to his personal information over many years. Harry has blamed the media, and particularly the Murdoch press, for his rift with other family members and attacks on his wife, Meghan Markle. Harry and Watson previously resisted settlement offers, saying the trial was needed to ensure accountability for the Murdoch titles and executives.

“I’m the last person who can actually achieve that, and also closure for these 1,300 people and families,” Harry told The New York Times last month. “I will be damned if those journalists are going to ruin journalism for everyone, because we depend on it.”

Accusations of a coverup

The stakes are high on both sides of the Atlantic.

Lewis started at Bezos’ Post a year ago. But his standing there was damaged before he arrived on the job, when NPR reported on the accusations that he played a key role in a coverup for the Murdoch tabloids, which arose against him in an earlier related case that settled. (Lewis was not a defendant in that claim, either.) The revelation last spring that he had pressured NPR and his own editor at the Post not to cover the allegations sparked a further outcry in the Post newsroom.

Through a spokesperson, Lewis and the Post declined to comment. An aide to Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, did not respond to a request for comment.

While not a defendant, Lewis is cited as participating in efforts to destroy evidence showing News UK’s leaders knew about the crimes their employees were committing on the tabloids’ behalf. Harry and Watson’s legal team also named the former IT director for News UK, who has since risen to be chief technology officer and the head of the Tubi Media Group for Murdoch’s television giant Fox Corp. in New York City, Paul Cheesbrough. He declined comment through a corporate spokesman, directing all comment to News UK.

Harry and Watson’s allegations also focus on the actions of News UK CEO Rebekah Brooks, the former top editor of both the News of the World and The Sun. She had been the chief executive of News UK in 2011, but resigned that summer. Brooks was later acquitted in a criminal case on phone hacking related charges and returned to oversee Murdoch’s newspaper arm here.

Going through with trial carries financial risks

If the trial proceeds, Fancourt, will decide whether these executives should be found to have “perverted the course of justice”.

The settlement would enable the Murdoch camp to quash the public presentation of evidence by Harry and Watson’s legal team —evidence meant to show that the Murdoch daily tabloid the Sun also engaged in widespread criminality in its reporting methods.

The plaintiffs allege that Lewis and the other executives orchestrated the deletion of millions of emails and withheld other material from police. According to police notes presented in court filings, Lewis told a police investigation they had to delete the emails to head off a scheme by Watson and former Prime Minister Gordon Brown to get materials surreptitiously from the computers of Brooks, the News UK chief.

Brown and Watson have denied any such plot; News UK has not to date produced any evidence publicly to support its existence. Brown has demanded a criminal investigation from Scotland Yard, which opened a preliminary review to determine whether a full investigation is warranted.

Harry won a case overseen by the same judge over similar acts by a different tabloid company, the Mirror Group, in 2023. The court in that case ruled that phone-hacking by the news company was “widespread and habitual” in the 1990s and early 2000s and that executives not only knew about it — but tried to cover it up. The judge said Harry’s cell phone was specifically targeted between 2003 and 2009.