Charlotte Griffiths, Editor at Large at the Mail on Sunday and a contributor to the Palace Confidential podcast, has recounted her friendship with Prince Harry and how she ended up in the High Court. She is believed to have met the King's second son at a party in 2011 and exchanged messages with him, with claims that he had messaged her via a Facebook profile under the name "Mr Mischief". Harry denies the claim.
The relationship came under scrutiny during the Duke of Sussex's High Court case against the Mail on Sunday's publisher, Associated Newspapers, which he claimed had hacked phones to get stories. He lost the case and was ordered to pay an interim £9.5 million.
Friendship with the prince
Asked by the host of the Daily Expresso podcast, JJ Anisiobi, "You met Prince Harry. What happened?", Charlotte replied: "What happened was, for a time in my twenties, I just sort of fell into this crowd that were kind of party animals."
She added: "There was Prince Harry, Princess Eugenie, Beatrice, all their mates. I ended up briefly becoming friends with [Harry]."
Balancing friendship and journalism
The journalist spoke about how she had to balance her friendships with her job. She said: "At the time, I was like sort of hanging around with this circle and I heard loads of things, but these were my friends. So I didn't want to write everything that I saw at that time. It wasn't always stuff directly at Harry."
She could have heard "a hundred anecdotes" during one weekend, but she "decided not to write any of them". "I had to learn on the job where your private life ends with your friends, and I value my friendships with my friends," Charlotte said.
"Obviously, it's a priority. So, I didn't want them to say, 'Well, let's not invite Charlotte. She'll write about every dinner party we ever have.' Of course, I eventually did write about it [...] and now I'm talking about it on this podcast, but I honestly would never have gone there if it wasn't for the High Court trial."
Evidence in court
She added: "I did sit on those messages, and the only reason I still have those messages is because they were on Facebook, because back in the day, when you slide into the DMs, you're doing it on the Facebook, because this was 2010 or whatever it was Facebook. Obviously, if they were WhatsApps or texts, I would have lost them anyway, because they would have been lost with my Nokia 1610 brick phone or whatever it is I had at the time. I think I had a Blackberry at the time."
"But because of the trial, I just went into my Facebook and, of course, Facebook keeps everything. This is what we should all be very wary of. So there I was, there was my exchange, and so, you know, I had to stick up for myself, really, because I was dragged into the High Court and they were evidence that, you know, I certainly am not a phone hacker, and I didn't need to be a phone hacker because I had actual contacts and friendships."
