Prince Harry has returned to California following his trip to the U.K., where he spent two days giving testimony against Mirror Group Newspapers for alleged unlawful information gathering.
PEOPLE understands the Duke of Sussex is back in Montecito, where he and Meghan Markle moved in 2020 after stepping back as working members of the royal family.
Prince Harry, 38, traveled to the U.K. this week to appear in a London court. He launched the claim in 2019, alleging that his phone voicemails were hacked. MGN is the publisher of the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, Daily Express and more.
On Monday, attorney David Sherborne told the court that Prince Harry was not available to give evidence that day after traveling on Sunday night after celebrating his daughter Princess Lilibet’s second birthday. “His travel arrangements are such and his security arrangements are such that it is a little bit tricky,” Sherborne said, according to Reuters.
Harry appeared in court on Tuesday and Wednesday, undergoing cross-examination by MGN’s lawyer Andrew Green.
In his witness statement released Tuesday, the Duke of Sussex said that “tabloids would routinely publish articles about me that were often wrong but interspersed with snippets of truth, which I now think were most likely gleaned from voicemail interception and/or unlawful information gathering.”
“I genuinely feel that in every relationship that I’ve ever had — be that with friends, girlfriends, with family or with the army, there’s always been a third party involved, namely the tabloid press,” he said in the witness statement. “Having seen me grow up from a baby (being born into this ‘contractual relationship’ without any choice) and scrutinised my every move, the tabloids have known the challenges and mental health struggles that I have had to deal with throughout my childhood and adult life and for them to then play on that and use it to their own advantage, I think is, well, criminal.”
During his time in the U.K., PEOPLE understands that Prince Harry stayed at Frogmore Cottage, the Windsor home where the Duke and Duchess of Sussex lived before relocating to the United States after a short stint in Canada.
In March, a spokesperson for the couple’s Archewell Foundation confirmed to PEOPLE that Harry and Meghan “have been requested to vacate their residence at Frogmore Cottage.” However, it was unclear when they would officially move out.
The public got a glimpse inside Frogmore Cottage in the Netflix series Harry & Meghan, which debuted in December 2022. There, Prince Harry and Meghan shared intimate photos from when they moved out in 2020, along with shots of their two children when the family visited the U.K. for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee last June.
“We both came back in March from Canada, and that was sort of our farewell week,” Harry said of the transatlantic move in 2020.
“We were going through so many boxes, just literally looking at everything, going, ‘Oh my gosh, this blanket I missed, that hat was so funny,’ ” Meghan added. “Just taking it all in, and it really just gave us a chance to look back at our whole love story.”
“We always saw Archie running around the garden at Frogmore Cottage, and maybe jumping in the Queen’s pond. That was all part of our future, and everything changed really, really quickly,” Harry shared. “We knew we were going to get some breathing space from this very painful experience that we’d been stuck in, but also at the same time, it was really sad.”
Prince Harry made several visits to his home country in recent months. After appearing at a different court case against the Associated Newspapers Ltd (ANL), publisher of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, in March, he returned in May to attend his father King Charles’ coronation at Westminster Abbey. The trip to the crowning ceremony was also a quick visit, as Prince Harry headed to the airport shortly following the event, which fell on his son Prince Archie’s 4th birthday.
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