The keys on his phone got stuck...The crisis at the News of the World intensified today with the release of new material which confirms that the paper is being accused of attempting to hack into the phone messages of a public figure within the last year.
The material – a high court document and a brief statement from lawyers – shows that Kelly Hoppen, an interior designer who is stepmother to the actor Sienna Miller, is suing the News of the World and one of its feature writers, Dan Evans, for "accessing or attempting to access her voicemail messages between June 2009 and March 2010".
The Guardian has previously reported that Dan Evans was suspended in April last year. Details of the case remain concealed by court orders. However, a senior News International executive has claimed that Dan Evans's defence is that he phoned Hoppen's number for legitimate reasons and accidentally accessed her voicemail when the keys on his phone got stuck.
The News of the World issued a robust statement, saying it had carried out an "extensive investigation led by a team of independent forensic specialists" and "found no evidence whatsoever to support this allegation".
"The civil litigation is ongoing, as is the internal investigation and until both are concluded it would be inappropriate to comment further. However we are disappointed the BBC chose to lead with this misleading report without giving the News of the World an opportunity to respond," the paper added.
The timing of the alleged hacking will cause most concern to Rupert Murdoch's News International. The company has claimed repeatedly that only one of its journalists was involved in the illegal interception of phone messages – the royal correspondent Clive Goodman who was sacked and jailed in January 2007.
The allegation that hacking continued after Goodman's jailing will also cause problems for Scotland Yard. In December, the Guardian disclosed that the Yard had failed for four years to investigate evidence in its possession that the News of the World's private investigator Glenn Mulcaire had targeted the phones of Miller and Jude Law and their friends and family.
A family friend of Miller's said this morning: "If the police had warned Sienna at the time, she would have warned her family, including her stepmother. And if they had pursued the evidence which they had in their hands, they would have discovered that Clive Goodman was not the only journalist involved."
The high court document released this morning is signed by Mr Justice Eady and discloses that in March last year Hoppen successfully applied for an order that required Vodafone to disclose the phone number and other details of a person who had accessed or attempted to access her voicemail. It is believed that Hoppen went to court after receiving an automatically generated security alert from Vodafone warning her that somebody had attempted to change her four-digit pin code.
Eady's summary of the case also discloses that the court issued an injunction forbidding any subsequent attempt to contact Hoppen's phone or use any material obtained from it. "The court was satisfied that the claimant was likely to succeed at trial," Eady writes of the injunction application.
At the time of her original action, Hoppen was suing "a person or persons unknown". However a statement from her solicitor, Mark Thomson of Atkins Thomson, this morning discloses that after Vodafone handed over its data, on 23 July last year, the defendants were identified as Dan Evans and the News of the World's parent company, News International Supply Company.
Evans was suspended in April, after Hoppen's legal action began. In early June, reporters from the New York Times approached News International with questions about his suspension. News International then informed the Press Complaints Commission, which chose not to investigate on the grounds that the case was the subject of a live legal action.
A full hearing in the case is scheduled for 17 February.
In a separate development yesterday, a high court master rejected a request from the News of the World for more time to submit its defence to the case being brought against them by Miller. This case implicated the paper's news editor, Ian Edmondson, in commissioning hacking. Edmondson was suspended in December and sacked yesterday.
Lawyers for Miller argued that the paper had claimed to have run a full internal inquiry into hacking in 2006/7 and that it could not ask for extra time to do so again. The paper was ordered to submit its defence before a previously agreed deadline of 9 February.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/ja ... oppen-suesI grow increasingly hopeful that the NOTW will actually have to close up shop - the rumours alone they've paid a couple of people £1m+ already, should mean those with cases will push for everything they can get at least
