Michael Holden
London: A tearful Elizabeth Hurley said her landlines and home was bugged as part of a “brutal invasion of privacy” to produce stories, as the actor gave evidence to the High Court in London as part of high-profile privacy lawsuit against the Daily Mail.
Hurley, 60, is one of seven claimants, including Prince Harry and singer Elton John, suing the Mail’s publisher Associated Newspapers for alleged privacy violations dating from the early 1990s to the 2010s.
Associated, which also publishes the Mail on Sunday, has called the allegations against it “preposterous smears”.
Hurley, the claimants’ second witness, is suing over 15 stories which she says featured information obtained unlawfully, including medical details about her pregnancy with son Damian and arguments with his late father, Steve Bing.
She said Bing was “obsessed” with the “ludicrous” idea that she had named her child after Damian from the horror film The Omen and that she did not know how that information was shared with a journalist.
While Hurley gave forceful responses to some questions, at times she clutched a tissue to her face and wiped away tears during cross-examination from Associated’s lawyer, Antony White.
Watching on in court was Harry, who appeared in the witness box himself on Wednesday and was sitting next to her son Damian, 23, patting his back in support when she became emotional.
Hurley rejected suggestions that her friends, including Elton John’s husband David Furnish, had passed on information to the press.
She said her phones had been bugged and microphones attached to windows in her house “listening to all my conversations”.
“It was deeply hurtful,” she said. In her written witness statement, she said her discovery in 2020 about this “brutal invasion of privacy” had left her crushed.
Much of White’s questioning centred on whether Hurley could have known about her claims against the Mail sooner, with the publisher arguing that the lawsuits had been filed too late.
She said she first learned about phone hacking from her ex-boyfriend, the actor Hugh Grant, in 2015 when he told her that she could launch a claim against another newspaper group, Mirror Group Newspapers.
“He probably gave me puppy dog eyes and persuaded me,” she said. “He probably just said ‘you’d be doing a good thing’.”
Hurely told the court she gave all the damages she won from MGN, 350,000 pounds ($690,000), to Hacked Off, a press reform campaign group Grant supports, but said she never really had any “grown-up conversations” with him about the issue.
“Sometimes he tried to tell me but I’m afraid I didn’t really listen,” she said. “We are just silly together … maybe I’m not a very good friend.”
Reuters
.png?width=1200&auto=webp&trim=0%2C0%2C0%2C0&w=390&resize=390,220&ssl=1 "Residents are fed up with outdoor concert venue in Colorado and sue for excessive noise")
