Prince Harry lost his last tabloid lawsuit as a UK court threw out every claim against the Daily Mail's publisher

The Duke of Sussex went to court one more time, and this time nobody paid him a penny.

On Tuesday, July 7, the UK High Court dismissed every claim in Prince Harry's lawsuit against Associated Newspapers, the publisher of the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday, according to court documents seen by CBS News. The judge said the allegations could not be proven. That is the whole verdict, and it is widely expected to be the last of Harry's long run of courtroom fights with the British press.

Harry was not fighting alone. The claimant list read like a benefit-gala seating chart: pop star Elton John and actor Elizabeth Hurley were among the group suing ANL, all of them accusing the publisher of gathering private information through phone tapping, intercepting voicemails, and people impersonating others to pry loose personal details. Their lawyers said the alleged behavior ran from 1993 to 2011 and, in their telling, carried on into 2018. Roughly 50 articles were cited.

ANL's position, start to finish, was that none of it happened. The publisher called the allegations "preposterous," said the articles in question were built on information gathered lawfully from people close to the claimants, and argued the case should be thrown out simply because so much time had passed. On Tuesday the court threw it out, though on the narrower ground that the claims were not proven.

Harry's courtroom scorecard

Here is the part that gets lost in the "Harry loses" headlines: he has actually won some of these before.

• In 2023, he beat Mirror Group Newspapers on 15 of 33 phone-hacking claims and was awarded around $180,000 in damages. The publisher later paid him a further $370,000 to settle the rest.
• Last year, the publisher of The Sun paid him "substantial damages" out of court and apologized for the methods it had used.
• This week, against the Mail's publisher, he walked away with nothing.

So the real record against the tabloids is mixed, which is not the tidy story either side likes to tell.

The backdrop nobody had to script

The ruling landed in the middle of a rare Harry visit to the UK, a trip that came with its own tabloid-ready subplot. Meghan, Archie, and Lilibet stayed home. Harry and Buckingham Palace had a very public back-and-forth about where he would even stay and what security he would get, which is a genuinely strange thing to be squabbling over on your way into a privacy trial.

Harry's feelings about the press are not a secret and never have been. He has long blamed the media for the 1997 death of his mother, Princess Diana, who was killed in a Paris car crash while being chased by photographers. When this lawsuit opened in January, he said the snooping had left him "paranoid beyond belief." His words, in court, on the record.

The court did not weigh in on whether the tabloids are saints or villains. It ruled on whether these specific claims were proven, and it decided they were not. Harry can still appeal. After this many rounds, though, the likelier headline is that the fight is finally done.