Sienna Miller Justifies "I Love You" Comment to Daniel Craig, Kate Moss' Shocking Involvement

E.ONLINE
January 31, 2014
by LILY HARRISON



More juicy tidbits continue to unfold in a British court regarding Jude Law's phone-hacking scandal.

This time, proceedings at the Old Bailey in London further discussed intimate details about Sienna Miller's alleged affair with Daniel Craig.

The blonde took the stand via satellite from New Orleans on Friday, Jan. 31, and was shown sitting next to an FBI agent.

The Brit actress was asked about the voicemail message that she left for the James Bond actor in 2005.

Miller was in a relationship with Law at the time, and reportedly told Craig: "Hi, it's me. I can't speak, I'm at the Groucho with Jude. I love you."

The 32-year-old star explained, "The thing that's been slightly misconstrued about this voicemail message is that I said 'I love you' and that this was some incredibly important declaration of love. I've always ended my calls to Daniel saying 'I love you.'"

Miller was questioned as to whether or not she was carrying on a relationship with Craig the same time that she was dating Law. "Whether or not I was in a relationship with Daniel Craig, it was not a relationship, it was a very brief encounter, and he was my best friend," she explained to the court.

"My saying 'I love you,' whether anything romantic happened briefly or not, there was nothing significant."


READ MORE HERE: http://www.eonline.com/news/506104/sienna-miller-justifies-i-love-you-comment-to-daniel-craig-kate-moss-s-shocking-involvement

Hugh Grant to sue News Corporation over hacking SARAH MORRISON (THE INDEPENDENT)

The actor and campaigner Hugh Grant is to join the lengthening list of celebrities in suing News Corporation for phone hacking, and has pledged to give any damages he is awarded to helping fellow victims. The 51-year-old is believed to feature in police evidence suggesting the unlawful interception of communications, and has instructed solicitors to submit a claim within days.

Grant confirmed yesterday that he is to sue, and has earmarked any award for helping the cause of lower-profile victims of press intrusion. Grant told The Independent on Sunday: "If I am successful in my legal action, then I hope that the court makes the billionaire owner of a multibillion-pound corporation write the cheque directly to Hacked Off, and helps empower them to ensure we have a free and responsible press in the future. Then Mr Murdoch can return to his favourite pastime of staring at photos of naked princes.

READ MORE: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/hugh-grant-to-sue-news-corporation-over-hacking-8081426.html

Hugh Grant to lead phone hacking reform group Hacked Off (NEWS.CO.AU)

Charles Miranda in London
From: News Limited Network
August 23, 2012 10:52AM

ACTOR Hugh Grant is to become a director of a not-for-profit group championing press reform in Britain.

Grant's new post comes as police prepare to name the 600 victims of phone hacking.

The 52-year-old actor has been the public face of the phone hacking scandal campaign, called Hacked Off, since last July when he famously had a verbal stoush with Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre at the parliamentary Leveson Inquiry into media standards.

Hacked Off wants to push through reforms on press regulation and be funded by contributions from other phone hacking victims who were awarded compensation from, among others, News International.

His directorship move came as prosecutors in the phone hacking scandal prepare to reveal the full list of 600 victims of hacking by the now defunct News of the World.

So far, only 200 names have been revealed including actress Sienna Miller, Beatle Paul McCartney, Brad Pitt and football ace Wayne Rooney.




Read more:http://www.news.com.au/news/hugh-grant-to-lead-phone-hacking-reform-group-hacked-off/story-fnejlvvj-1226456462987

Mother of Hugh Grant's baby wins paparazzi pledge Splash News gives Tinglan Hong high court undertaking not to pursue or harass her, in ruling that could help protect celebrities Share 0 Email Lisa O'Carroll guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 18 July 2012 13.57 EDT (THE GUARDIAN)

The mother of Hugh Grant's baby has received an undertaking that a picture agency will not pursue or harass her. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA

The mother of Hugh Grant's baby has received a high court undertaking from a picture agency not to pursue or harass her, in a ruling that could give celebrities new protection against paparazzi photographers.

Mr Justice Tugendhat has issued an order accepting the "permanent undertakings" from celebrity news agency Splash News "not to doorstep, pursue or harass Tinglan Hong or her child with paparazzi photography or place either of them under surveillance or approach within 100 metres of their home".

The order is the latest stage in Grant's legal campaign to get photographers banned from outside Hong's home.

Last year Hong told the high court how her life has been made "unbearable" by the constant pursuit by photographers, including "a tall man in his 30s" driving a black Audi car who she claimed caused her to crash.

She claimed that on some occasions as many as 10 or more people have been camped outside her house, staying all night even in the rain, in the hope of getting a picture.

Her account of her experience since she gave birth to Grant's child last year emerged in November when Tugendhat gave his reasons for granting an injunction forbidding harassment by unnamed photographers of Hong.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jul/18/hugh-grant-baby-paparazzi?newsfeed=true

Hugh Grant: No love lost, actually Posted on 09 July 2012 (THE BUDAPEST TIMES)

A government spokesman says he will inform Hugh Grant about the workings of the Hungarian press after the British actor cited Hungary as an example of the perils of state control of the media. Grant made the remarks in the European Parliament while advocating legal limits to media ownership at a Pan-European Forum on Media Pluralism and New Media. His main message, however, was that democracy had been undermined in the UK by politicians’ fear of large media organisations.

“Some people would argue that the same was the case in Italy under Berlusconi,” Grant said. This state of affairs was the opposite extreme from the “equally terrifying” danger of too much state control of the media, the actor said. “One has to be equally vigilant about that, if you look at Hungary as an example. So you’ve got two evils.”

Grant said he was in Brussels to “raise the flag” about the former evil.

Christian Democrat politician (and former MTV news anchor) István Pálffy suggested Grant may be suffering from delusions of grandeur. “I think Hugh Grant must be stuck in one of his acting roles and still believes he is the British prime minister, whom he played in the film Love Actually,” Pálffy said.


http://www.budapesttimes.hu/2012/07/09/no-love-lost-actually/

Yet another role being lined up for Colin Firth?

Russell Crowe is rumoured to be in the frame to play Rupert Murdoch.

The Gladiator star, 48, is thought to be in line to star as the Australian media mogul in the screen adaptation of former Sunday Times editor Sir Harold Evans' memoirs, Good Times, Bad Times, the Evening Standard reports.

Meanwhile, Oscar-winner Colin Firth is said to be tipped for a part as Sir Harold.
Leon Lecash, creative director of filmmakers What's It All About? told the newspaper: "The film will be a drama, when Citizen Kane meets All The President's Men, either for the big screen or television.


READ MORE:  http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5hgltpkolVPw4fj0owpoaIe8R8Pcw?docId=N0106791340707507548A

Why it's toff at the top for Hugh Grant (INDEPENDENT IE.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6NFj_HOXSA&feature=player_embedded

Saturday March 31 2012

If the British tabloids had it in for Hugh Grant before he became a star witness at the Leveson Inquiry, he's moved to the very top of their hit list since. And when the actor became a father for the first time late last year after a brief relationship with a Chinese neighbour, Tinglan Hong, the red-top knives were out.

In various hatchet jobs, Grant was portrayed as a reluctant, even indifferent father, and in an infamous Daily Mail column, Amanda Platell did a full-scale demolition on him. "Grant," she said, "has become a lonely, bitter man consumed with hatred of the media who helped make him a star. "In truth," she went on, "this great moral crusader is just another hypocritical celebrity who enjoys the money and fame that media exposure gives him, but who refuses to accept the accompanying responsibilities."

The "accompanying responsibilities", one presumes, include cheerfully accepting the mad pursuit of amoral paparazzi and the fact that your phone is tapped. But this fairly constant stream of vitriol is the price Grant is paying for taking on the tabloids.

Since uncovering evidence of phone tapping by chance in early 2011, Grant has become, perhaps, the leading and certainly the most articulate and fearless campaigner against press intrusion into people's private lives. He's become such a regular on Newsnight and other current affairs programmes that one could easily confuse him for a politician, and acting seems to have slipped down his list of priorities. Grant hasn't starred in a film in three years, and has only appeared in three since 2005.


READ MORE:  http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/film-cinema/why-its-toff-at-the-top-for-hugh-grant-3067126.html

Hugh Grant criticises Lord Hunt's press self-regulation revamp (THE GUARDIAN)

Actor says PCC chairman's plans won't work due to persistent failure of self-regulation over past 60 years

Lisa O'Carroll guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 27 March 2012 06.34 EDT

Hugh Grant claims that Lord Hunt's proposals would be unenforceable. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images 

Actor Hugh Grant has launched another broadside against the press, claiming that new proposals for self-regulation being put forward by Lord Hunt, the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, will not work.

Grant said "self-regulation has failed five times" over the past 60 years, and the only solution is to introduce a form of statutory system which will make it legally binding for newspapers to comply with a "code of ethics". Grant denied this amounted to "government control" when interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight on Monday night (interview begins after about 40 minutes).

"It's such an over-simplification to think it's a binary choice of its Zimbabwe at one end and a free-for-all at the other. There are so many gradations in between," he said. Grant, who is acting as a spokesman for Hacked Off, the lobby group which led the calls for an inquiry to the press, met Hunt on Monday to discuss the proposals. Hunt has proposed a new system based around contract law, but Grant said his legal advisers believed this would be unenforceable and that sanctions for breaches of the code amount to nothing.

 "Hunt draws parallels with the Premier League. But it's not an exact parallel, because if you breach your contract you are out of that Premier League, it's a huge penalty," said Grant. If you breach your contract as a newspaper you can't be thrown out [of the newspaper industry]." Grant added that he believed Hunt's "heart is in the right place" but his own "legal friends have a lot of doubts" about how the contract system could work.


READ MORE:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/mar/27/hugh-grant-press-self-regulation?newsfeed=true

Hugh Grant: Stood up to Tabloids (Spectator)

By Nick Cohen

 As the cops round up journalists, Trevor Kavanagh’s protest in the Sun has aroused amazement and some scorn. ‘Witch-hunt has put us behind ex-Soviet states on Press freedom’ — ran the headline, and the gist of the complaint among my friends was that it was a self-pitying and self-aggrandising piece of work.

 Whatever you think of the Sun or Kavanagh, however, it is worth hearing him out for three reasons.


 1. Kavanagh is being brave. We ought to applaud Hugh Grant for standing up to the tabloids even though he knows they will give him a bad press for the rest of his career. (You will have noticed that nearly everyone else in the celeb pack has let Grant and a few others fight their battles for them while they cower in a prudent silence.)

Similarly, we ought to applaud Kavanagh for standing up to his employers — something hardly any journalist or politician has done since Mrs Thatcher's day. His article is a barely coded protest against his proprietors. To save their hides, Rupert and James Murdoch closed the News of the World last year. Now they are handing evidence to the police that detectives can use to prosecute Sun reporters. Their disloyalty is staggering.

Murdoch’s employees bowed and scrapped before him, parroted his political prejudices, and sneaked and hacked to fuel his profits. Their rewards are the dole office and the police cell. Murdoch won business favours from politicians by bribing them with propagandistic coverage. Having taken all he could, he dumped them when they were no use to him. He is giving the same treatment to his journalists.

 We all like to pretend that we would behave like brave dissidents if circumstances demanded. But when our employers behave in ways they should not, how many confront them? You do not need to believe that the Sun is much of a newspaper to admire Kavanagh for speaking up. Like Labour and Tory politicians before him, he has learned the wisdom of the Psalmist’s warning to ‘put not your trust in princes’.


Read the rest of the article:  http://www.spectator.co.uk/nickcohen/7647868/we-are-all-journalists-now.thtml

Hugh Grant stands by his claim of phone hacking

11 February 2012 Last updated at 05:41 ET

 

Hugh Grant has refused to withdraw his suggestion that Associated Newspapers obtained information about him through phone hacking.

Mr Grant made the allegation about the publisher of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday to the Leveson Inquiry.

The actor told the BBC on Saturday that newspapers were not used to having their methods questioned.

Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre has denied the allegations, describing them as "mendacious smears".

In an interview with BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Mr Grant said: "I can see why they're cross because for once someone has had the courage to question their probity and their honesty.

"Generally speaking, if anyone does that with a paper like the Daily Mail, however much they may go on about freedom of speech, no one is allowed the freedom of speech to question the Daily Mail.

"If you do, you will be trashed. And that's what happened again and again and again to me and anyone else who has dared to question the Daily Mail."

Mr Grant said he would like the Leveson Inquiry into the practices of the press to result in a new regulatory body, in place of the Press Complaints Commission, with "teeth to sanction newspapers that go wrong".

He added: "The lowest priority in all my ranting and raving about media reform is my case or the case of any so-called celebrity."

Mr Grant denied he was actively giving up information about personal matters while promoting his films.

He said: "When you sit and do an interview are you asked about acting technique or are you asked 'how's your love life, what's it like with Liz Hurley?'

"You then have a choice. You can be Mr Pompous and say 'I really don't talk about my private life' or you can try and be a good sport and give a jokey answer."

Associated Newspapers told the Today programme that it had nothing to add to what Mr Dacre had said at the Leveson Inquiry.


Read further and listen to the BBC audio:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16995541

Hugh Grant Grant Goes To Parliament

Filed under: Anglophilia > Legal Matters > Politik > Hugh Grant

Hugh Grant's fight against the paparazzi has reached Parliament.

Grant spoke before Parliament about the rights of privacy when it comes to the tabloids.
Grant first had problems when he and Elizabeth Hurley were together. News of the World was caught targeting the two and hacking Grant's privacy.

Another instance occured when the press stalked his infant child and baby mama Tinglan Hong.
Grant said the following about tabloid coverage:

If I sell someone milk for 50p, you wouldn't expect anybody to come and say, 'You slut, now you've got to give me milk for free, for ever.

Grant continues to state that he is fine with giving interviews on his films and other things to the public.

He also agreed that the press should have covered his prostitute scandal.

[Image via WENN.]

Tags: british tabloids, hugh grant, paparazzi, parliament, privacy

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• Hugh Grant Just Became Dad!

Perez Hilton

Daily Mail asked for evidence over Hugh Grant lies claim

30 November 2011

By Dominic Ponsford

The Daily Mail has been asked to produce evidence to back up its assertion that actor Hugh Grant lied to the Leveson Inquiry.

In his evidence to the inquiry on 21 November, Grant accused the Mail on Sunday of hacking his phone and the Daily Mail of accessing medical information from a hospital about the mother of his child. Both assertions were robustly denied by publisher Associated Newspapers which also provided evidence to the contrary.

Associated also released a statement the same day, repeated in a Daily Mail leader column the following day, which said: “Mr Grant's allegations are mendacious smears driven by his hatred of the media.”

Yesterday the counsel for the phone-hacking victims, David Sherborne, asked Lord Justice Leveson what action is going to be taken over the Daily Mail’s attack on Grant.

He noted that Associated Newspapers was “going to come back with an explanation as to why they accused Mr Grant of lying”, adding later: “The mendacious smears line goes well beyond saying Mr Grant was mistaken or wrong.”

Leveson said: “I’m expecting some evidence to be served by Associated Newspapers in due course..It probably is a matter that will require evidence. It would be sensible if that were sooner rather than later.”

Leveson said he believed that the contentoius line has since been removed from the online version of the Daily Mail article - but at time of writing it does appear to be still online.

Before the lunchtime recess of the inquiry he told Associated Newspapers lawyer Jonathan Caplan QC: "I believed the sentence had been removed, if it hasn't been removed this is an urgent matter."


Press Gazette

UK media inquiry becomes hottest show in town as JK Rowling, Hugh Grant take tabloids to task

By Associated Press, Published: November 25

LONDON — It was a bad week to be a tabloid journalist in Britain.
For four days, the famous, the infamous, the bereaved and the wronged sat in a London courtroom and told how snooping, smears and snatched photographs had made their lives a misery. They portrayed the press as cynical and brutal in its treatment of individuals, capitalizing on their tragedies with little decency or compassion.

 

High-profile celebrities testified in UK courts about how they say they were hounded by paparazzi after their phones were hacked. (Nov. 25)

A-list witnesses including J.K. Rowling, Hugh Grant, and Sienna Miller turned Britain’s media ethics inquiry into the most compelling drama in town. But critics say it’s a misleading and one-sided show.
“It has not been a pretty sight,” said Bob Satchwell of media group the Society of Editors. “But there are 1,300 newspapers, national and regional, in Britain, and most journalists don’t behave in the way that’s being portrayed.”

The behavior of Britain’s scandalmongering, scoop-hungry and millions-selling tabloids was summed up by “Harry Potter” creator Rowling as “cavalier.” The best-selling author said newspapers took the attitude that “You’re famous, you’re asking for it.”

Rowling recounted how journalists slipped a note into her 5-year-old daughter’s school bag, took pictures of her children in their swimsuits and staked out her home until she felt “like a hostage.”
Grant said that since “Four Weddings and a Funeral” made him a star, details of his hospital visits had been leaked, his garbage rifled, his ex girlfriend and infant daughter harassed.

Miller, the star of “Alfie” and “Layer Cake,” described being pursued down the street at midnight by 10 large men.

“And the fact that they had cameras in their hands meant that that was legal,” said the 29-year-old actress. “But if you take away the cameras, what have you got? You’ve got a pack of men chasing a woman.”

Witnesses’ detailed descriptions of aggressive press intrusion, broadcast live on British television, have focused public attention on murky tabloid practices.

Media lawyer David Allen Green wrote in a blog for the New Statesman magazine that the inquiry was already helping freedom of expression.

“The merit of the Leveson inquiry — regardless of its formal findings in its reports — is that it is giving a platform to those whose voices are deliberately smothered by the tabloid press,” he wrote.
Not all the witnesses were famous. Some suffered because of proximity to fame. Mary Ellen Field, who worked for Elle Macpherson, recounted how the supermodel blamed her when personal stories started appearing in the press, and forced Field to go to a rehab facility in the U.S. for her — nonexistent — alcoholism.

Macpherson later learned her phone had been hacked — newspapers were getting information by illegal eavesdropping, not because of any indiscretion on Field’s part. Field had already been fired.
The parents of missing and murdered children told of much worse ordeals, of unbearable intrusion at times of grief.

Kate McCann, whose daughter Madeleine vanished during a family holiday in Portugal in 2007, said she felt “totally violated” when extracts from her private diary appeared in the News of the World tabloid in 2008.

Washington Post

'Harry Potter’ author J.K. Rowling testifies on media abuses in Britain

11/25/2011

Daniel S Levine

British writer JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series of books, poses during the launch of new online website Pottermore in London June 23, 2011. The seven Harry Potter novels will be available in ebook form in October, author J.K. Rowling said on Thursday at the launch of a new interactive online website Pottermore (www.pottermore.com) that will allow readers to navigate through the boy wizard stories. Rowling gave her clearest indication yet that she would not write an eighth Harry Potter story to follow the final instalment published in 2007 by Bloomsbury in Britain and Scholastic in the United States. REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett (BRITAIN - Tags: MEDIA SOCIETY ENTERTAINMENT)

SUZANNE PLUNKETT/Reuters/Fotoglif

Britain’s Lord Justice Leveson is currently leading an inquiry into the British media’s abusive pursuit of celebrities, searching for sensational stories as part of the fall-out of Rupert Murdoch’s phone-hacking scandal involving several celebrities. The last celebrity to testify was Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who told the Leveson Inquiry that she felt threatened and was even blackmailed by journalists into giving up information.

"It feels threatening to have people watching you. The cumulative effect … becomes quite draining,” she said, according to The Los Angeles Times.

Rowling also went into detail about how the paparazzi camped outside her house to get pictures, one journalist who claimed he was someone else to get news and another who even put a note in her daughter’s backpack. “I felt completely trapped in the house, and of course that had a massive effect on the children,” she said.

The Telegraph reports that Rowling has taken legal action over 50 times in just 14 years to keep her daughters out of the public eye, because, “children do best when they are kept out of the public eye.”

During her testimony, she also talked about how the press framed one of her daughters as a “bully,” claiming that she, “distressed fellow pupils by revealing that Harry Potter dies in the final Harry Potter book,” when Rowling was working on the final novel in 2007.

Other celebrities, including actors Hugh Grant and Sienna Miller have also testified before the inquiry. Earlier in the week, Miller said the News of the World, “made her life hell” and that the paper’s phone-hacking had caused her to experience “complete anxiety” and “paranoia,” according to
the Telegraph.

Read more - http://po.st/SngYVQ

Celebrity Cafe

Terence Blacker: Hugh Grant, my missing team-mate

He went away one of us and came back a star. Now I can see why everything had changed

My team-mate was worried by a surprising development in his life. He had been receiving anonymous calls on his car-phone. This sudden, inexplicable curiosity of strangers made him feel uneasy. Almost two decades later, he is rather more militant in his views about intrusion. As I watched Hugh Grant testify to the Leveson Inquiry this week, it occurred to me that early signs of the nasty side-effects of celebrity we see today were evident all those years ago when our right-back suddenly became famous.

Character is revealed on the football pitch. Hugh and I were part of – indeed at one point jointly organised – a ragtaggle team of freelancers (this paper's distinguished sketch writer Simon Carr was at one point a central defender) which played on Wednesday afternoons. On the pitch, Hugh was rather different from what was to become his screen persona: he was, shall we say, robustly competitive.

Shortly after he mentioned the mysterious calls, he went off to make a film, and I was away from London for a few months, teaching creative writing at a university. When I returned, Hugh's face was on posters on every street. The film was Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Although he would occasionally play for us after that, everything changed, and in a way which the evidence to Lord Leveson has helped to explain. There was a guardedness there, a distinct sense of separateness. The easy, unthinking view is that becoming well-known tends to give people airs. The truth is that it is not fame that screws up the famous so much as the attitude to fame of the outside world.

A self-protective bubble is required. Nothing is normal any more. No one can quite be trusted. There is always a danger that something said or done in a relaxed moment can be leaked to a gossip column, with miserable consequences.

Even at the time, it struck me that Hugh was paying a high price for his success as an actor. He and I were no closer than weekly footballing buddies, but he was always funny and open. It seemed a shame that he now had to be so cautious, so unlike himself.

Cultural weirdness about celebrity, unpleasant in the mid-1990s, has today become grotesque and shameful. Curiosity about those in the public eye – for whatever reason – has led to a sinister sense of ownership which, in its turn, has encouraged the kind of press harassment, bullying and inhumanity exposed this week.

The last time I saw Hugh, we were playing in a tournament together and he seemed slightly unfriendly in a way which I found bewildering at the time. Now I realise that the problem was that by then I was writing a newspaper column. I was among the ranks of the enemy.

The Independent

www.terenceblacker.com

See full witness statements from Hugh Grant to the Leveson inquiry

Hugh Grant appearing before Leveson Inquiry - video - you have to love this guy after this

Hugh Grant: Non-Murdoch Tabloid Hacked Me in 2007

By JILL LAWLESS Associated Press

LONDON November 21, 2011 (AP)

Actor Hugh Grant said Monday that he believes his phone was hacked by Britain's Mail on Sunday tabloid — the first time he has implicated a newspaper not owned by Rupert Murdoch in the wrongdoing.

Grant, star of "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and other movies, told an inquiry into media ethics that a 2007 story about his romantic life could only have been obtained through eavesdropping on his voice mails.

He said he could not think of any other way the newspaper could have obtained the story alleging that his romance with Jemima Khan was on the rocks because of his conversations with a "plummy voiced" woman the paper identified as a film studio executive.

Grant said there was no such woman, but he did receive voice messages from the assistant of a producer friend.

"She would leave charming, joking messages ... and she had a voice that can only be described as plummy," he said.

Grant sued the newspaper for libel and won.

Challenged as to whether he was speculating about the source of the story, Grant acknowledged that he didn't have any hard proof.

"Speculation? O.K. But ... I'd love to hear what the Daily Mail or the Sunday Mail's explanation of what that source was if it wasn't phone hacking."

AP

British actor Hugh Grant

Prime Minister David Cameron set up the inquiry into media ethics in the wake of a still-evolving scandal over phone hacking in Britain. Murdoch shut down the discredited News of the World tabloid in July after evidence emerged that it had routinely eavesdropped on the voice mails of public figures, celebrities and even crime victims in its search for scoops.

Grant is one of a string of high-profile witnesses, including actress Sienna Miller and author J.K. Rowling, who will testify about how they were followed, photographed, entrapped and harassed by tabloid journalists.

The first witnesses Monday were the parents of murdered teenager Milly Dowler, whose mobile phone voice mails were hacked after she disappeared in 2002.

Her mother told the inquiry that she believed her missing 13-year-old was still alive once she reached the girl's previously full voice mailbox.

Sally Dowler said when she could finally leave a message on her daughter Milly's voice mail weeks after the girl disappeared, she shouted: "She's picked up the voice mails! ... She's alive!"

In fact, messages on Milly's phone had been deleted by someone working for the News of the World tabloid while the Dowlers and the police were still searching for the girl, who was later found dead.
The Dowlers said they had been utterly shocked when police told them, much later, that Milly's phone had been hacked.

Sally Dowler said she "didn't sleep for about three nights."

"When we were given that information, it was terribly difficult to process it," she said.

Her husband Bob said he recognized immediately that the information was "dynamite." News that tabloid journalists had targeted not just celebrities but a murdered girl shocked many Britons and triggered a police investigation and media recriminations that are still unfolding.

The Dowlers took the stand together and spoke in quiet, composed voices during their 30 minutes of nationally televised testimony.

They described their shock and anger when a private walk to retrace their missing daughter's last steps was secretly photographed by the tabloid.

ABC

At British hearing, stars turn tables on tabloids

By RAPHAEL G. SATTER, Associated Press

Associated PressNovember 20, 2011 12:28 AMCopyright Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

---

---

(11-20) 00:28 PST LONDON, United Kingdom (AP) --

They've been hacked and libeled, stalked and slandered. Now the public figures whose personal lives have long offered grist for Britain's news mill have been given a rare chance to confront their tabloid tormors.

Film star Hugh Grant, "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling, and the father of missing girl Madeleine McCann are among those due to testify over the next week at the U.K. inquiry into media ethics — a judicial body that could recommend sweeping changes to the way Britons get their news.
The nationally televised inquiry would give many of those in the public eye an unprecedented chance to challenge those who write about them, said Cary Cooper, a professor at northern England's Lancaster University and the author of "Public Faces, Private Lives."

"This is the first time the celebrities have been able to strike back," Cooper said. "I think it will have an impact, and the media might — for a while at least — pull away."

Speaking ahead of the testimony, victims' lawyer David Sherborne told the inquiry multiple tales of shattered privacy, broken lives and even suicides stemming from relentless media intrusion.
"When people talk of public interest in exposing the private lives of well-known people or those close to them, this is the real, brutally real impact which this kind of journalism has," Sherborne said.
Britain's media ethics probe was set up in the wake of the scandal over phone hacking at Rupert Murdoch's News of the World, which was shut in July after it became clear that the tabloid had systematically broken the law. Most horrific was the news that the tabloid had broken into the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler in its search for scoops.

Cooper acknowledged that celebrities like Grant or actress Sienna Miller — another star due to give evidence — have struggled to get much in the way of public sympathy even when it was shown that their privacy had been invaded. But he said their appearance alongside crime victims such as Bob and Sally Dowler or Gerry McCann could mark a shift in attitudes.

"They're going to get hit worse by the Milly Dowler family and witnesses of that ilk," he said.
Sherborne, in a two-and-half-hour-long presentation Wednesday, promised to make journalists squirm.

Most powerful among his accusations was the suggestion that media coverage had driven some celebrities' family members to the brink of suicide — or beyond.

Sherborne said that former Formula One racing boss Max Mosley believed that the suicide of his 39-year-old son Alexander could also be at least in part attributed to "the very public humiliation" dealt to his father by the News of the World's expose of his sexual shenanigans.

He went on to outline the case of soccer player Garry Flitcroft, whose life was turned upside down by a newspaper's revelation that he'd cheated on his wife. Flitcroft's children were teased in school, his family was tracked by helicopter and his ailing father fell into a deepening depression before taking his own life, the lawyer said.

Another case involved Charlotte Church, the British singer who shot to stardom as a teenager. Sherborne said she'd been subjected to waves of harassment. Photographers chased her in cars, tried to take pictures up her skirt and cut holes in bushes to install secret cameras. So hungry was the press for scoops about her private life that journalists revealed she was pregnant before she had even told her parents.

Worse still was the News of the World's expose of her father's affair in 2005. Sherborne said that Church's mother had attempted suicide shortly before the story ran, but that rather than hold back, "the newspaper approached her mother directly and persuaded her to give them an exclusive, despite her fragile condition, as part of a Faustian pact that in return they would not run another lurid follow-up story about her husband's affair."

Others testifying over the next seven days include comic actor Steve Coogan, whose romantic exploits have been exhaustively documented, and broadcaster Anne Diamond, who was targeted by Murdoch's press after she challenged the mogul about his ethics.

Chris Jeffries, who was wrongly implicated in the murder of his tenant, is also due to give evidence, along with soccer star Paul Gascoigne's ex-wife Sheryl; human rights activist Jane Winter; former army intelligence officer Ian Hurst; and Margaret Watson, whose teenage daughter Diane was stabbed to death in 1991.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/11/20/international/i001543S09.DTL#ixzz1eGchvQ8k

Hugh Grant's Family 'Hounded' After He Spoke Out About Phone-Hacking

The mother of the actor's child sustained "an appalling campaign of harassment," the Inquiry into British press standards is told.

LONDON - The mother of Hugh Grant's baby daughter was hounded and threatened by the press because the actor has spoken out on phone-hacking, the Leveson Inquiry heard Wednesday.The wide-ranging Judicial Inquiry into British press standards and intrusion - launched in the wake of the News of The World phone-hacking scandal - heard that the harassment was direct retribution for Grant's decision to speak out against phone-hacking in a public campaign.

The claim was made by David Sherborne QC, the barrister representing a large number of phone-hacking victims at the Inquiry. His clients include Grant, the family of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, the parents of murdered toddler Madeline McCann and motorsports boss Max Mosley.
Sherborne told the inquiry that he had had to apply for an injunction to protect the woman, who had sustained "a campaign of appalling harassment" and has "received threats because of the fact that the father of her child has spoken out against the press."

The harassment included abusive calls Sherborne said, though he did not claim to know who the calls were from.

"..Whilst Mr Grant was appearing on Question Time, discussing the closure of the News of the World, Rupert Murdoch and press standards generally, she received a barrage of telephone calls … when she finally answered she was threatened in the most menacing terms, terms which should reverberate around this Inquiry: 'Tell Hugh Grant he must shut the fuck up.'"

Outlining a further litany of incidences of press harassment from a whole range of British newspapers - not just the News of The World - Sherborne told the inquiry that he believed press behaviour was partly responsible for the suicide attempt of singer Charlotte Church's mother.

The singer's mother took an overdose after lurid details of her husband's affair were exposed.
And he said that his client Max Mosley - whose sexual tryst was exposed by the News of The World - believed that his son's suicide was in part because of the effect of exposure on his family.

Earlier, the Inquiry heard from Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger that News Corporation's power and influence had been a force of intimidation in British life.

"Did people, both internally and externally, feel a fear of News International? Was its influence across many aspects of British political and cultural life simply too dominant? How did News Corp leverage its commercial, political, journalistic and (as we now know) outsourced criminal muscle?" he asked.

The Leveson Inquiry has heard opening statements from various participants in its first week of hearings and will hear from Hugh Grant, JK Rowling, Max Mosley, Charlotte Church and Steve Coogan from next week. A second phase of the Inquiry will focus directly on criminal revelations at the News of The World, hearing evidence from, among others, Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch.

Earlier the inquiry heard from Neil Garnham QC, representing the Metropolitan Police, that it "could not be assumed" that all 28 names found in the notebooks of investigator Glenn Mulcaire were those of News of The World staff.

"Some of them probably are. For many others it's impossible, at least thus far, to say if they were or not."

News International's lawyer Rhodri Davies QC had told the Inquiry on Tuesday that the number was disputed.

The Hollywood Reporter

Mother of Hugh Grant's baby takes out injunction against paparazzi

Tinglan Hong granted anti-harassment order by the high court after being besieged by photographers

• Amelia Hill
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 November 2011 12.54 EST
• Article history

 

Hugh Grant had been forced to employ round-the-clock security guards to protect Tinglan Hong, his lawyer said. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

 

Tinglan Hong, the mother of Hugh Grant's daughter, has been forced to seek an anti-harassment order against paparazzi who she says have been harassing her since the birth of her baby.

An order granted on Friday by Mr Justice Tugendhat at the high court of justice in London means that anyone harassing Hong or her baby daughter – or encouraging or helping others to do so – risks being imprisoned, fined or having their assets seized.

Mark Thomson, the solicitor acting for Hong, said: "The means that some of these photographers have used to get pictures for the tabloids are utterly appalling.

"Today's injunction stops paparazzi pursing her, doorstepping her, harassing her, following her or putting her under surveillance."

It is understood that the detailed, five-page injunction also forbids photographers approaching within 100 metres of Hong's home or taking pictures of her when she is with family and friends, in any building not open to the public, or while she is being followed or pursued by other photographers.
Thomson said the severity of the order was an indication of the level of harassment Hong has been suffering. "It appears that Tinglan has been under media surveillance since [her relationship with Grant was revealed in] January," added Thomson. "Tinglan has been literally under siege since the newspapers announced the birth [in November]."

Because of the harassment Grant has been forced to employ security guards to protect Hong at her home round the clock. When that failed to defuse the attention, he engaged his own lawyer, Thomson, to argue for the injunction.

"Hugh Grant is genuinely worried. He wants his child to be protected," said Thomson. "It's outrageous behaviour [on the part of the press]."

The need to seek an injunction to protect his daughter and former partner will strengthen Grant's determination to force a change in the attitude towards privacy intrusion of some members of the media.

Grant became the public face of the Hacked Off campaign against phone hacking this summer. He said he was convinced his phone was routinely hacked by journalists and is leading the fight to end what he calls a "culture of privacy intrusion" by some members of the press.
The actor is one of 46 alleged victims of media intrusion – along with Harry Potter author, JK Rowling, actor Sienna Miller, Formula One boss Max Mosley and the parents of Madeleine McCann and Milly Dowler – who will give evidence at the Leveson inquiry into alleged media intrusion into their private lives.

He has yet to seek civil damages from any media organisations because, he said, he would be able to speak "with a cleaner voice" if he had not made any financial benefit from the scandal.

Grant met the prime minister in October to press his case for tighter regulation of Britain's news industry after joining forces with Hacked Off to call for an end to the excesses of the tabloid press.
He was invited to meet David Cameron after taking his film-star glamour to all three main party conferences. At conventions in Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham, Grant accused tabloid newspapers of having a business model of "privacy theft for profit".

To packed meeting halls, he attacked politicians for their "craven" approach to Murdoch, whose support, he said, could help to swing elections. "Five successive governments licked the boots of one particular media owner," he said.

Sitting on panels alongside campaigners from English PEN and Index on Censorship, Grant insisted he was prepared to fight a "time-consuming, long-grass operation" to show how widespread the problem of press intrusion is.

The Guardian