Duke of Sussex court case: key witness statement false

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I looked for another thread on this but didn't see one.

The story is about the case Prince Harry (and 6 others) are bringing against the Daily Mail (Associated Newspapers) for phone hacking. Back in July the claimants were told to reveal any payments that were made to witnesses in exchange for evidence; this seems more serious.

From what I can gather the main witness (Gavin Burrows) in the case was employed by the claimants' team over a couple of years to help research into the phone hacking by different organisations and to track down relevant people. He says he was asked on several occasions if he had worked for the Daily Mail and always denied it, and the first he knew of the current case was when he heard in 2023 that Baroness Lawrence had brought it based on his evidence.

Apparently Burrows wrote a statement at that time (2023) denying the claims and has now written a more detailed statement also denying the claims.

The claimants now don't want to call him as a witness (unsurprisingly) but do want to rely on (some of) his evidence as 'hearsay evidence'.
They also don't want Associated Newspapers to be allowed to call him as a witness.

Telegraph archive link
https://archive.is/YAjNq

I haven't heard before of 'hearsay evidence' being used like this - does anyone know the rules? How can it be tested?

That's a bit of a strawman argument.

Nobody here is defending illegal information gathering, but that is thus far unproven in this case.

Such practices are also, thankfully, mostly a thing of the past. Nobody is chasing Harry and his wife around or going through Meghan's knicker drawer. What we know of their 'private' life comes directly from them.

Fair and reasonable as always ...

I'm not sure that Brooklyn needs to be scrutinized in his multiple nepo careers but given he is an influencer that puts out statements on his SM he cannot really expect not to get comments.

This is a good point - Harry is a hypocrite who has made his career out of selling private information of other people.

I was a bit sickened at the publication of Spare when the pre-publicity was teasing the revelations of "Harry losing his virginity to an older woman" and so many women who had ever met Harry were hounded as a result that they might have "seduced" the prince. Yet it turned out to be a drunken bonk in a field with an employee barely 18 months older than him - the modern day equivalent of the Master's son sleeping with the housemaid in Victorian times.

Not just family members . What about the woman he lost his virginity to ? Or his former disabled House Mistress ?

This case differs from the other cases though , the sun and mirror were already proven to be guilty during the levinson enquiry and obviously they already had put aside a fund for settlement ( which they did with Harry ) , ANL and the daily mail were found not guilty.
this case is not being brought with knowledge of proven guilt but with accusations against a previously declared innocent party , ANL are not going to settle and will fight to keep their name clean , Sherborne will need to have real evidence and proof this time.

Does anyone know what the point is of Harry and the other claimants giving evidence, and if it’s their choice, or they’re compelled to by the Mail?

It seems to me that there is nothing they’re bringing to the table in terms of any actual evidence to support their own cases - beyond trying to elicit sympathy (which surely wouldn’t make a difference to a judge?!) and the KC for the Mail isn’t giving them that hard a time - except as mentioned before allowing them to make assertions he can later state are completely baseless. But surely all of that is covered by the written statements.

So is there any real reason for them to be taking the stand? Is it just to allow them to talk themselves into a corner with how flimsy their narrative actually is?

This is utterly stupid of me, jeff, but i honestly hadn't realised ANL escaped "conviction" in the Leveson Inquiry

I may not be a lawyer, but even I can see that'll avoid claims that they did it last time so must have done on this

I haven't followed this case too closely but is there still the possibility it could be struck off due to the Statute of Limitations? It just seems so strange hearing these people talk about things that happened almost a generation ago. Could ANL still have the case thrown out on those grounds?

I have only recently found this out myself @Puzzledandpissedoff! , the history and information was explained by a lawyer on another platform ( with evidence) and I finally understood! 🤣
but it makes sense, particularly as Sherborne was involved in levinson and apparently made quite the packet without much effort! , he has been after levinson 2 ever since, this makes previous telling offs by judges, even more clear.

They have to give evidence. Technically their lawyers could apply to rely on their witness statements alone but unless you were very worried about the credibility of your client, you wouldn’t do that. It’s their case. They should be there.

Who is next to give evidence ?

I think it's Doreen Lawrence.

Apparently it was supposed to be Jude Law, but his statement is being accepted without being contested, so he doesn't have to appear.

I think ANL suggested in one of the pre-trial hearings that it should just be thrown out but the judge said no.

Some of the evidence (e.g. emails to/from Sadie Frost) seems to suggest that one or more of the claimants knew before the relevant date, so individual cases might fall depending on what comes out during the trial.

From the evidence we’ve heard from Harry and Liz Hurley so far, their excuses about why they supposedly didn’t suspect anything before 2019/20 seem very flimsy indeed, and I would be surprised to have that blindly accepted based on only their word (particularly when Harry himself is openly lying on the stand)

I wonder also if that’s another reason he’s not being challenged on some of his lies, so it can be used in closing statements - ie. You can’t take anything he says as reliable as he’s lied under oath, one example being saying he’s never been to Ibiza before

This is the one I am really confused about. Frost claims her nannies phone was hacked but the nanny did a kiss and tell story on law for money years before frost says she knew in 2019 or is it not about the affair, he also slept with her 2 best friends at the time, the press didn't need to do any digging on that everyone knew.

Actually should also say, you can agree witness evidence with your opposition which presumably is what happened here.

I think this is part of ANL's case and the reason behind some of the questioning

Harry claims he knew nothing about hacking/Leveson - yet his brother involved the Met as early as 2005 which kicked off the whole NOTW scandal - but Harry claims to have been totally unaware

LH claims also to have known nothing about Leveson despite her "best friend" Hugh Grant giving highly publicized evidence in 2011. Then the pair of them sued other press in 2015 and LH was very involved with the Hacked Off organisation and gave it £350,000 in 2015(?) but claims she knew nothing about ANL until 2020 and the dodgy document that the author denies writing.

@Lunde
When you put it like that it does seem bonkers.

I thought it was Doreen Lawrence - but I'm a bit puzzled because Barrister Bouffant told the court that he could not produce the next witness on Thursday - yet Harry was reported as meeting her at the House of Lords.

IIRC the judge hasn't fully ruled on whether the claims were time barred - he decided to allow it to be tested in court.

The claimants have to show that they didn't know about UIG until 2019/20 which is what they claim.

Yes, that's what I meant - sorry for not being clear.

Harry's evidence seemed to make no distinction between the alleged events of the past and Meghan's more recent misery with the press. The whole thing is a blur of feelings and people being mean.

Precisely.

Liz and Harry both testify that they.were so traumatized by press stories in the 2000s that they coulfn't fathom how the press got hold of that they cry about them even now.

Harry had a brother who established that had had been phone-hacked and went to the polis. Cue Leveson

Liz had a close friend (does your son's godfather count as family?) who was all over Leveson.

Leveson was all over the news, and I'll bet that all the PR agencies were taking careful note.

But Liz and Harry would have.us believe that:

Either they were in an information bubble where all the hacking stuff that was everywhere in the news and in the lives of their nearest and dearest passed them by. And Wills and David Furnish never suggested to them - hey, that thing that happened to you, could have been phone hacking, you know!

Or they were so thick or incurous that they never thought - ooh, phone hacking! THAT would explain all those traumatic horrid things that happened back, then!

I'm not buying it. I think they thought ANL would pay them to go away.

Exactly.

Andy Coulson, editor of News of the World, publicly apologised in 2006 to both William and Harry for hacking their phones.
William and Harry were reported to be bringing joint legal action over phone hacking until about 2019, when Harry decided to proceed on his own.
It seems unlikely that any reputable legal firm working with them over that period of time wouldn't have kept them informed about Leveson and its implications.

(William settled with NGN in 2020 - a settlement which was not disclosed until Harry disclosed it in his court documents in his own legal case against NGN in 2023.)