In a Modern witnesser testimonial , Harry calls out a 2002 article that account a game to “ steal a sample ” of his desoxyribonucleic acid in an attempt to confirm if or not King Charles III was his biological father .
Prince Harryslammed “cruel” rumors speculating thatKing CharlesIII is not his biological father.
This week, the Duke of Sussex took to the stand in London as part of aphone-hacking lawsuitagainst Mirror Group Newspaper Limited (MGN) — the publishers behind the Daily Mirror, the People, and the Sunday Mirror.
In the suit, Harry, along withother public figures, claims that journalists from MGN’s various outlets exploited a security gap in order to gain access to his personal voicemails from friends and family. The group has denied this accusation.
The Prince’s decision to testify in the major trial marks anunprecedented movefor a senior member of the Royal Family. However, given his complicated relationship with the British media, it comes as no surprise that Harry is using this opportunity to air his frustrations.
As well as taking to the stand, a55-page witness statementwas released on Tuesday, in which Harry details various times in his life that he suspects journalists at the newspaper group used unlawful methods to gather information for stories about him.
At one point in the written statement, Harry references a December 2002 article published by the People, titled, “Plot to rob the DNA of Harry,” which he explains reported “a plot to steal a sample of my DNA to test my parentage.”
He writes that numerous papers around this time reported a rumor claiming that his real father was Major James Hewitt — a man that his mother,Princess Diana, hadan affairwith during her marriage to King Charles III.
It is known that Princess Diana’s affair with James Hewitt took place after Prince Harry was born — with the pair reportedlyfirst meeting in 1986— meaning the rumors are untrue. However, Harry said this was a fact he was unaware of at the time these reports were circulating.
“At the time of this article and others similar to it, I wasn’t actually aware that my mother hadn’t met Major Hewitt until after I was born,” he writes, adding that he eventually learned the actual timeline of the affair years later in 2014.
He claims that the journalists working at the paper had been aware of the true timeline of events when the 2002 story was published, and therefore knew it was not possible that Hewitt was his father.
“At the time, when I was 18 years old and had lost my mother just six years earlier, stories such as this felt very damaging and very real to me,” he writes. “They were hurtful, mean, and cruel.”
Harry also recalls that he was “always left questioning the motives behind the stories,” and whether they were planted in an attempt “to put doubt into the minds of the public” so he “might be ousted from the Royal Family.”
In the witness statement, he accuses the journalist behind the story, Dean Rousewell, of having previously used “unlawful information gathering techniques.”
The Prince addressed the rumors about his parentage in his memoir,Spare, which was released at the start of this year. He claims that King Charles III would regularly make jokes about the speculation.
“Pa liked telling stories, and this was one of the best in his repertoire,” he wrote in the book. “He’d always end with a burst of philosophizing. … Who knows if I’m really the Prince of Wales? Who knows if I’m even your real father?”
Despite this, Harry said he found the widespread teasing to be “remarkably unfunny,” adding that the media “couldn’t get enough” of the speculation. “Maybe it made them feel better about their lives that a young prince’s life was laughable,” he wrote.
