Actor Hugh Grant has settled with The Sun newspaper and its owner NGN over a charge of illegal wiretapping.
“(Rupert) Murdoch’s money stinks and I refuse to let this silence me,” writes Grant himself on X.
For more than ten years, Hugh Grant has been one of the biggest critics of the British tabloids and the allegedly illegal methods they have used.
“As completely innocent people tend to do, they have offered me a huge sum to keep the case out of court,” he writes sourly in a long post after Wednesday’s decision.
In addition to illegal wiretapping, the current case against The Sun also concerns allegations that the newspaper’s employees allegedly broke into Grant’s home and also wiretapped his car.
Risked paying
The actor writes that he basically does not want to accept the money and that he would have “loved” to see the charges brought up in court, but that the rules of civil cases prevent him from doing so.
According to Grant, he runs the risk of having to pay the legal costs of both parties, even if he wins but is awarded compensation that is less than the amount he has now agreed to.
“My lawyers say that’s exactly what’s most likely, and Rupert Murdoch’s lawyers are very expensive,” Grant writes, continuing:
“So even if I were to be found right on every charge, I could be forced to pay close to 10 million pounds (close to 140 million kroner). I’m afraid that scares me”.
Many claims for damages
The newspaper, like several other tabloids, is owned by Rupert Murdoch-owned News Group Newspapers (NGN), which according to The Guardian in the past two years has paid out £185 million in damages for illegal wiretapping. It is only a small part of the more than 1,500 claims for damages that have come against NGN.
“Murdoch’s money stinks and I refuse to let it silence me,” Grant writes, stating that he will donate the money to groups working to expose “the worst sides of the oligarch-owned press.”
Facts: The hacked phone scandal
The accusations against the media companies MGN and NGN are rooted in events between 1991 and 2011 when journalists and private detectives tapped answering machines to get information about people in the royal family, politicians, sports stars, celebrities and crime victims – among them Prince Harry, Hugh Grant and Sven-Göran Eriksson.
In 2006, an editor responsible for royal coverage at Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid and a private detective were arrested. The big scandal then flared up in 2011 when it emerged that a murdered schoolgirl had been the subject of wiretapping by the same newspaper.
As a result of the scandal, the News of the World was shut down in 2011. Last December, a judge ruled that MGN – with newspapers such as The Daily Mirror and The Sunday People – engaged in extensive phone hacking against Prince Harry. He was then awarded £140,600 in damages.
Since 2014, MGN has settled more than 600 cases and paid over £100m in damages and legal costs.
(TT)