Prince Harry and six others, including musician Elton John and actress Elizabeth Hurley, have been ordered to pay an initial payment of 9.5 million pounds, or Rs 124 crore, to the Daily Mail’s publisher after they lost the invasion of privacy case.

However, lawyers of the claimants said that the interim payment should only be 7.9 million pounds or a little over Rs 102 crore.

The claimants could potentially pay up Rs 326 crore more after that.

In a judgement on Friday, Justice Matthew Nicklin said in a statement that the payment must be made in a week, as the public figures could not prove the allegations.

The seven claimants had alleged malpractice, such as illegal hacking of phones by Associated Newspapers. However, the publisher denied the claims, and the judge said that there had been a shortage of evidence to support the claims and that the reporting could have come from legitimate sources.

Other high-profile figures involved in the case were Doreen Lawrence, the anti-racism activist whose son Stephen was stabbed to death in 1993 as he waited for a bus, Elton John’s film producer husband David Furnish, actor Sadie Frost and politician Simon Hughes.

The judgement was made two days after it was made public that Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, were moving back to the UK.

Previous Privacy Cases Of Prince Harry

Prince Harry won a judgement in 2023 that condemned the publishers of the Daily Mirror for “widespread and habitual” phone hacking. 

Last year, Rupert Murdoch’s flagship UK tabloid, The Sun, made an unprecedented apology for intruding on his life for years and agreed to pay substantial damages to settle his privacy invasion lawsuit.

Harry has said his litigation, in which he broke with royal family tradition to seek relief in the courts, was a primary source of his falling out with his father, King Charles III, and brother Prince William.

Prince Harry, through his legal actions, seeks to reform the news media that he says damaged his relationships and made him “paranoid beyond belief”.

He blames the press for the death of his mother, Princess Diana, who was killed in a car crash in 1997 while being pursued by paparazzi in Paris, and for attacks on his wife, Meghan, that led the couple to abandon royal life and move to the United States in 2020.

(With inputs from Associated Press)