Pop star settles over hacking harassment

News Corp. agreed to pay 600,000 pounds ($953,000) to Charlotte Church, the U.K. pop star, and admitted its News of the World tabloid hacked her mobile-phone messages for “many years,” starting when she was 16 years old.

At a court hearing on Monday in London, News Corp. lawyers said the company regularly harassed Church’s family, put them under surveillance, hacked the phone of her father and acquired details of her mother’s “complex medical history” and suicide attempt to write scoops about the Welsh singer, now 26.

“I would have learned nothing more from an actual trial, since it is clear that no one from News International was prepared to take the stand to explain their actions,” Church said in a statement about the company’s U.K. publishing unit. “In my opinion, they are not truly sorry, only sorry that they got caught.”

One of about 70 victims to sue News International, Church settled last week, days before the first civil trial over the scandal was to begin. The deal comes after a person familiar with the matter, who isn’t authorized to speak about the case, said Church’s agent in Los Angeles and publicist in New York have been identified as the first potential U.S. victims of the tabloid’s hacking.

Church, a mother of two, told an inquiry into media ethics that News Corp.’s Sun daily tabloid may have hacked her phone to report her pregnancy in 2007 before she’d told her friends and family.

While that claim wasn’t part of her case, the company said on Monday it had obtained the singer’s private medical information through phonehacking and didn’t elaborate.

Church, who sang at Rupert Murdoch’s wedding in 1999, when she was 13, had sought special damages in the case because of the distress the stories caused her mother. The News of the World in 2005 reported Church’s father was having an affair and used cocaine, and that her mother tried to kill herself as a result.

“The trial wasn’t going to be about phone hacking,” Church said last week in an interview at her home near Cardiff, Wales. “They were going to do everything they could to weaken us, especially my mom. That’s obviously where it was going and I didn’t want to see them go through it again.”

News Corp. said it had harassed Church’s mother in the past and coerced her into giving an interview about her attempted suicide.