‘Monstrous, staggering things’: Tearful Liz Hurley tells court her home, phone were bugged

London: A tearful Elizabeth Hurley said her landlines and home were 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.

Harry – who choked up in the witness box himself on Wednesday – and was sitting next to Damian, 23, in court, patting his back in support when Hurley 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”.

“The Mail’s unlawful acts against me involve landline tapping my phones and recording my live telephone conversations, placing surreptitious mics on my home windows, stealing my medical information when I was pregnant with Damian, and other monstrous, staggering things,” Hurley said.

“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.

Hurley said she had hoped Damian, now a model and actor himself, would never see these articles.

“I felt really mortified that my son would be able to read all this stuff one day, and I feel really bad that that day is today when all this stuff is being regurgitated,” she said as she became upset when shown some of those articles in court.

“Yet again, everyone’s privacy is being invaded in this terrible way, and I feel very helpless about that.”

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 learnt 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’.”

Hurley told the court she gave all the damages she won from MGN, £350,000 ($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, AP

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