A Hacking Case Becomes a War of the Tabloids
By SARAH LYALL and DON VAN NATTA Jr.
NYT
LONDON — It was a classic tabloid scoop: a young woman’s account of a two-year affair with the actor Ralph Fiennes, spiced up with racy details of what he liked to do and how he liked to do it. Three newspapers — The Sunday Mirror, The Mail on Sunday and News of the World — carried their versions of the tale on Feb. 5, 2006.
The first two papers obtained the story via the normal tabloid route, paying the woman, Cornelia Crisan, £35,000 to tell all.
But it appears that News of the World, furious at the prospect of being outmaneuvered, took a sneakier approach: It illegally hacked into the voice mail messages of Ms. Crisan’s press agent, Nicola Phillips, and stole the story, according to allegations in a new lawsuit.
The details of how News of the World went about its operation are soon to be made public as part of the lawsuit, brought by Ms. Phillips against the newspaper and its parent company, News Group Newspapers, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News International.
Court papers in the case, as described by people familiar with the lawsuit, shed a stark and unflattering light on the newspaper’s reliance on phone hacking as a standard reporting method. This conduct is at the heart of a growing array of civil lawsuits and criminal inquiries against the paper and News Group.
(More here.)
NYT
LONDON — It was a classic tabloid scoop: a young woman’s account of a two-year affair with the actor Ralph Fiennes, spiced up with racy details of what he liked to do and how he liked to do it. Three newspapers — The Sunday Mirror, The Mail on Sunday and News of the World — carried their versions of the tale on Feb. 5, 2006.
The first two papers obtained the story via the normal tabloid route, paying the woman, Cornelia Crisan, £35,000 to tell all.
But it appears that News of the World, furious at the prospect of being outmaneuvered, took a sneakier approach: It illegally hacked into the voice mail messages of Ms. Crisan’s press agent, Nicola Phillips, and stole the story, according to allegations in a new lawsuit.
The details of how News of the World went about its operation are soon to be made public as part of the lawsuit, brought by Ms. Phillips against the newspaper and its parent company, News Group Newspapers, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News International.
Court papers in the case, as described by people familiar with the lawsuit, shed a stark and unflattering light on the newspaper’s reliance on phone hacking as a standard reporting method. This conduct is at the heart of a growing array of civil lawsuits and criminal inquiries against the paper and News Group.
(More here.)
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