By JILL LAWLESS
Associated Press
LONDON — Rupert Murdoch’s media empire apologized and agreed to cash payouts Thursday to 37 people — including a movie star, a soccer player, a top British politician and the son of a serial killer — who were harassed and phone-hacked by his tabloid press.
The four — Jude Law, Ashley Cole, John Prescott and Chris Shipman — were among three dozen victims who received financial damages from Murdoch’s British newspaper company for illegal eavesdropping and other intrusions, including email snooping.
Lawyers for the claimants said the settlements vindicated their accusation that senior Murdoch executives had long known about the scale of illegal phone hacking and had tried to cover it up.
Financial details of 15 of the payouts, totaling more than 640,000 pounds (about $1 million), were made public at a court hearing Thursday. The amounts generally ran into the tens of thousands of pounds — although Law received about $200,000, plus legal costs, to settle claims against the now-shuttered News of the World tabloid and its sister tabloid, The Sun.
Law was one of 60 people who have sued Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers, claiming their mobile phone voicemails were hacked. Others whose settlements were announced Thursday at London’s High Court included former government ministers Chris Bryant and Tessa Jowell, rugby player Gavin Henson, Princess Diana’s former lover James Hewitt, singer Dannii Minogue and Sara Payne, the mother of a murdered girl.
It was the largest group of settlements announced yet in the long-running hacking scandal, which has shaken Murdoch’s global empire, spurred the resignations of several of his top executives and reverberated through Britain’s political, police and media elite.
Law, the star of “Sherlock Holmes” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” said he was “truly appalled” at the scale of surveillance and privacy invasion that his case had exposed.
“No aspect of my private life was safe from intrusion by News Group Newspapers, including the lives of my children and the people who work for me,” he said in a statement. “It was not just that my phone messages were listened to. News Group also paid people to watch me and my house for days at a time and to follow me and those close to me, both in this country and abroad.”
