Intense media scrutiny led Prince Harry to falsely accuse a friend of leaking details of a school prank to reporters, the estranged royal testified Tuesday during his bombshell civil trial against a UK newspaper group.
An anecdote in his memoir “Spare” is based on the “assumption” that a school friend sold a story about him to the tabloids, the flame-haired royal admitted on the stand.
The Duke of Sussex, 38, told the London court that he initially believed that a leaked story about his classmates at Eton College shaving his head as a joke over 20 years ago got into the tabloids thanks to a loose-lipped pal, according to The Telegraph.
“As a kid at school, I could never have imagined how they got wind of that story so I made the assumption [that a friend leaked it],” Harry explained of his version of events in “Spare,” which was published in January.
“Many years later, it seems that wasn’t the case,” he admitted.
Harry has accused the Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) of hacking his phone and using other illegal and unethical surveillance methods on him between 1996 and 2009 to obtain information about him.
He is the first senior royal to take the stand before a courtroom in 130 years, since his great great great grandfather Edward VII testified in a slander trial over a card game, before he became king.
Harry spoke about the how the media’s intrusiveness strained his personal relationships.
“Unfortunately many of those friends, who became paranoid over the time, are no longer my friends,” he said.
“The more this happens over time, the less you share with people…I become paranoid about the people around me.”
Harry noted that he was particularly distraught over a pair of 2002 articles that accused him of doing drugs with his friends, SkyNews reported.
“The fact that the defendant’s journalists were trying to drag some of my friends into this and name and shame them sickens me,” he wrote in his 55-page witness statement.
“Not only did I have the stress and worry about who I could trust with any personal details about myself, but I also knew I had to worry about anyone that I was close to becoming a target for the defendant.”
While on the stand, Harry reiterated that he believes both stories were the product of unlawful information gathering.
Prince Harry’s assumption that his school friends were selling him out to the newspapers is one of many explosive claims in “Spare,” in which he also speculated that he was born to provide organs and other “spare parts” for his older brother, Prince William, who is heir to the throne.
At one point in the book, Harry also compared the royal family to a “death cult.”
The publication of “Spare” is also thought to have deepened the rift between Harry, his wife, Meghan Markle, and his father, King Charles III.
Meghan, 41, famously skipped King Charles’ May 6 coronation altogether, while Harry attended the main service before quickly returning to their California home.
Last week, a source close to the prince’s late grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, accused the retired royal of being “incredibly hurtful” during the monarch’s final days.
“For Harry to announce he was writing a memoir when his grandmother was not just recently widowed but actually dying herself, as he must have known she was — well, the cruelty of it takes the breath away,” they said.
Prince Harry and Meghan famously distanced themselves from his family in 2020, when they stepped down as working royals and moved to Montecito, where they live with their two children, Prince Archie, 4, and Princess Lilibet, 2.
The case against MGN is the first of Harry’s multiple media lawsuits to go to trial. The defendant has maintained that it used documents, public statements, and proper sources to lawfully report on the young royal’s activities.
In his book, Harry wrote that his “hair never fully recovered after letting [his] Eton classmates shave it off,” and said he began going bald afterwards.
With Post wires