There’s no way around it, the loss of the Daily Mail lawsuit is extremely bad news for Prince Harry. It’s also bad news for the other litigants, including Elton John, David Furnish, Sadie Frost, Elizabeth Hurley and Baroness Lawrence. Obviously, 99% of the attention, outrage and derangement is being focused solely on Harry though. One of the weirdest things is that everyone in the British media is acting like the costs of the lawsuit – reportedly between $53-67 million – will fall solely on Harry. Many of Harry’s defenders are claiming that he and his co-plaintiffs were all insured, but I can’t find any information about the insurance policies. There will be a hearing in late July to determine who owes what for all of these legal fees. In the meantime, the usual suspects are gleeful that Harry is finally “broke.”
Prince Harry has suffered the “most complete” and “totally self-inflicted humiliation” of his career during his doomed return to the United Kingdom, according to a pair of royal experts. “What has happened today, it’s a cataclysmic disaster,” said the Daily Beast’s royal expert and European editor-at-large, Tom Sykes, on The Royalist podcast.
In a stinging blow to Harry, a judge in Britain dismissed every claim in a lawsuit that the Duke of Sussex and six celebrity co-claimants brought against the publisher of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, meaning his six-year-long war with the British tabloids ended in defeat.
Sykes added that the judgment lands at an “absolutely terrible time for Harry, just as it appears that King Charles has finally run out of patience with his errant son, denying him rooms at Buckingham Palace.”
Harry was in the U.K. on what was supposed to be a triumphant homecoming when the verdict landed. But the trip had already descended into embarrassing chaos on Monday, when his team announced he had accepted an offer to stay at Buckingham Palace, only for the palace to say minutes later that the offer had been withdrawn.
Valentine Low, a former royal correspondent for The Times, argued that Harry’s latest courtroom defeat is also the one that hurts most.
“The Mail was the target he really had in his sights, and it meant a lot to him. And to lose that one and to lose it so comprehensively is very wounding,” Low told Sykes.
Harry’s lawsuit also came with a painful price tag, with the combined legal costs from the 11-week, 45-day trial estimated at around $53.5 million. The ruling leaves Harry and his co-claimants—Sir Elton John, David Furnish, Baroness Doreen Lawrence, Elizabeth Hurley, Sadie Frost, and Sir Simon Hughes—to cover their own legal expenses and pay millions toward the Mail’s costs.
“Meghan’s going to have to sell a whole lot more jam. I’m serious,” Low quipped, referring to the Duchess of Sussex’s troubled jam business venture. “Harry’s not got that kind of money. So, one does wonder, you know… who’s bankrolling this court case because there’s no way Harry’s got all those millions to pay all those legal costs.”
Between insurance, the fact that the costs are spread out between six people, and the possibility that the court costs might be reduced, I doubt Harry would end up out of pocket for anything more than $10 million? But again, I have no insider knowledge, that’s just me talking out of my ass. And Harry actually does have that kind of money, although it’s definitely a financial blow. They really got him, didn’t they? A decade of the most deranged BS I’ve ever seen in my life, and this is how they got him. This is how they hurt him.
Look at at the media insanity outside of his event yesterday in London:
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Avalon Red.
