LONDON (AP) — Prince Harry won his phone-hacking lawsuit against the publisher of the Daily Mirror on Friday, receiving more than 140,000 pounds (just over $178,000) in the first of several lawsuits against British tabloids that have gone to trial ) awarded.

Supreme Court Justice Timothy Fancourt found that phone hacking at Mirror Group Newspapers was “widespread and habitual” over many years and private investigators were “an integral part of the system” to unlawfully gather information. He said newspaper executives knew about the practice and covered it up.

Fancourt said he had awarded the Duke of Sussex damages for 15 of the 33 newspaper articles at issue in the trial, which were the result of unlawful information gathering and led to the misuse of Harry’s private information.

“Today is a great day for truth and accountability,” Harry said in a statement read outside court by his lawyer.

Fancourt awarded the Duke damages for the distress suffered and a further amount for aggravated damages to “reflect the particular pain and sense of outrage” at the fact that two directors of Trinity Mirror knew about the activity and failed to stop it.

“Instead, they closed their eyes to what was happening and literally kept it quiet,” said Fancourt. “Had the illegal behavior been stopped, the misuse of the Duke’s private information would have ended much sooner.”

Harry, the estranged younger son of King Charles III, had demanded 440,000 pounds ($560,000) as part of a crusade against the British media to counteract his family’s long-standing aversion to litigation and make him the first senior member of the royal family make that testified in court in over a century.

His appearance on the witness stand over two days in June sparked a spectacle as he made allegations that Mirror Group Newspapers had employed journalists to listen to voicemails and hired private investigators to use deception and illegal means to learn more about him and other family members.

“I believe that phone hacking was occurring on an industrial scale in at least three newspapers at the time,” Harry claimed in the Supreme Court. “There’s no doubt about it.”

The judge said that in his testimony, Harry tended to “assume that whatever was published was the product of voicemail interception,” which was not the case. He said the Mirror Group was “not responsible for any unlawful activity directed against the Duke”.

The case is the first of three lawsuits Harry has filed in court against the tabloids over allegations of phone hacking or some form of unlawful information gathering. They form the front line of attack on his life’s mission to reform the media.

Harry’s feud with the news media runs deep and is cited repeatedly in his memoir, Spare. He blames paparazzi for the car crash that killed his mother, Princess Diana, and he said the intrusion of journalists prompted him and his wife Meghan to leave royal life for the United States in 2020.

Harry alleged that Mirror Group Newspapers used unlawful means to produce almost 150 stories about his early life between 1996 and 2010, including his romances, injuries and alleged drug use. The reporting caused great emotional distress, he said, but was difficult to prove because newspapers destroyed records.

Of the 33 articles at the heart of the trial, Mirror denied using unlawful reporting methods in 28 and made no admissions in the remaining five.

The same judge who previously heard the Mirror case dismissed Harry’s hacking allegations against the editor of The Sun. It allows Harry and actor Hugh Grant, who has similar allegations, to stand trial over allegations that News Group Newspapers journalists used other unlawful methods to spy on them.

Another judge recently gave Harry the green light to bring a similar case against the publisher of the Daily Mail, rejecting the newspaper’s efforts to dismiss the lawsuit.

Phone tapping by British newspapers dates back more than two decades, to a time when unethical journalists used a simple method to call the numbers of royals, celebrities, politicians and sports stars and, when asked, a leaving a message, entering standard passwords to listen to voicemails.

The practice erupted into a full-blown scandal in 2011 when it emerged that Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World had intercepted messages from a murdered girl, relatives of deceased British soldiers and bombing victims. Murdoch closed the newspaper.

It later emerged that the newspapers had used more intrusive methods such as telephone tapping, house wiretapping, and obtaining flight information and medical records.

Mirror Group Newspapers said it had paid more than 100 million pounds ($128 million) in other phone-hacking lawsuits over the years, but denied wrongdoing in Harry’s case. It said it used legitimate reporting methods to obtain information about the prince.

In one case, the Mirror Group apologized “unreservedly” for hiring a private investigator for a story about Harry’s nightclub party in February 2004. Although the article headlined “Sex on the beach with Harry” was not among the articles in dispute during the At trial, Mirror Group said he should be paid compensation of 500 pounds ($637).