Earlier this month, at The New York Times’s DealBook Summit, Prince Harry quite spectacularly teased his upcoming showdown with Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers. In January, he’s set to begin trial over allegations that reporters at various tabloids paid private investigators to hack into voicemail messages between 1996 and 2011 in pursuit of salacious stories about celebrities. “The scale of the cover-up is so large that people need to see it for themselves,” the 40-year-old Duke of Sussex, now living in Montecito with his wife, Meghan Markle, told Andrew Ross Sorkin.
Given the fallout from the phone-hacking scandal—including a parliamentary investigation and resignations that rattled the Murdoch empire—it’s surprising there’s never been a trial. That’s largely because News Group has spent hundreds of millions of dollars settling claims to avoid one. Under U.K. law, if a defendant makes a “Part 36 offer” and the claimant declines, the claimant becomes liable for both sides’ legal costs if the judgment ultimately falls short of the offer. And so, one by one, high-profile victims like Sienna Miller and Hugh Grant have chosen to settle. But not Prince Harry. Whatever you think of him, the son of the famously hounded Princess Diana seems determined to see this through—and put on a show, even if, inevitably, he becomes the financial loser.