A judge has judge ordered Prince Harry to do some explaining. 

What the judge wants Harry to explain, according to the Daily Mail, is why he deleted messages between he and the person who helped him to write his memoir.

The background here is that Harry and about 40 others are suing News Group Newspapers (NGN), claiming, among other things, that they have had their phones hacked.

The trial, in the case, is scheduled to begin in January 2025.

What's going on?

This past week, a preliminary hearing was held in the case, and, at the hearing, NGN asked the judge - Justice Fancourt - to order Harry to turn over various documents that may have evidentiary value.

The Daily Mail reports, "Among them were messages exchanged between the Duke and JR Moehringer who ghost-wrote Spare, published in January 2023."

We know that the two had lengthy text message exchanges between them because Moehringer has publicly admitted to this. Not only this, but Moehringer further claimed that, during these exchanges, "no subject was off the table."

This is why NGN is requesting that Harry turn over the messages because it believes that the messages, given their scope, could be relevant to the lawsuit. The judge, on Thursday, agreed.

The only problem is that the messages have been deleted - and they were deleted after the lawsuit had already begun. In other words, it sounds a lot like destruction of evidence.

"Troubling"

The judge, during the hearing, called the situation "troubling."

He said:

I have seen troubling evidence that a large number of potentially relevant documents and confidential messages between the duke and the ghost writer of Spare were destroyed some time between 2021 and 2023, well after this claim was under way. The position is not transparently clear about what happened, and needs to be made so by way of a witness statement from the claimant himself.

that is a fancy way of saying that Harry has to explain himself. The judge was Harry to go on the record about why these messages were deleted after the lawsuit had already begun.

Now, the big question is why the messages were deleted. Was, for example, he trying to hide unfavorable evidence? The answer, at the moment, is unclear.

Regarding the deleted messages, Harry's lawyer told the judge:

This was a highly necessary process, not to hide anything but to delete highly sensitive information about [Harry] and the royal family which, if leaked, would not only compromise his security but also be potentially damaging to the [duke] and his family.