CHARLOTTE HITS OUT AS SHE WINS £600,000
CHARLOTTE Church and her parents yesterday received £600,000 damages and costs after settling their hacking claim against the News of The World.
The singer said ‘nothing was deemed off-limits’ by the tabloid, which targeted her from the age of 16 and ‘bullied’ her mother into an interview about her own attempted suicide after learning about it through intercepting voicemails.
Speaking outside the High Court, the 26-year-old said the paper’s actions had left her ‘sickened and disgusted’ and that ‘they are not truly sorry, only sorry they got caught’.
She said staff at the News of the World had been ‘prepared to go to any lengths’ to cover up t heir wrongdoing by
‘My mother was bullied’
destroying documents relating to the ‘industrial scale of their illegal activity’.
Speaking of the targeting of her parents, she said: ‘I was a teenager at the time and my parents were not in the public eye, they just happened to have a well-known daughter.
‘Whatever I have had to go through, they have suffered as well. They have been harassed, put under surveillance, and my mother was bullied into revealing her own private medical condition for no other reason than they were my parents. ‘Someone in a newspaper thought that was OK. How can that be, in any right-thinking society?’
The settlement covers the family’s £300,000 legal costs, with the remaining £300,000 damages being split between Miss Church, her mother Maria and adoptive father James.
The payout is the highest so far from the original batch of 60 test cases launched last year against the tabloid.
Miss Church had brought the case claiming 33 articles were based on illicit information gathered by hacking. She said the resulting publicity devastated her family’s business and her mother’s health.
During yesterday’s hearing, lawyers for the family said their voicemails had been repeatedly ‘targeted’ since 2002, when Miss Church was only 16.
As a result, the tabloid had ‘unlawfully obtained her private medical information and details of her personal relationships with her family and friends’.
The publisher of the News of the World is facing a second wave of compensation claims for phone hacking, with up to 244 alleged victims now seeking payouts.
A total of 194 individuals have either begun or are in the process of launching legal claims, while the now defunct paper’s publisher, News Group Newspapers, has also been directly approached by nearly 50 people seeking compensation.
So far, 14 of the new claimants have started proceedings. They include: Cherie Blair; Eimear Cook, former wife of golfer Colin Montgomerie; Colin Stagg, the man wrongly accused of the murder of Rachel Nickell; and singer James Blunt.