Phone hack reporter: The shame drove me to drugs
A JOURNALIST who hacked Sienna Miller’s ‘I love you’ message to Daniel Craig told yesterday how he turned to drink and drugs to cope with his depression over phone hacking.
Dan Evans, 38, said he began ‘selfmedicating’ with cocaine and alcohol as he struggled to cope with his role as a notorious phone hacker, first at the Sunday Mirror and then at the News of the World.
He claimed he offered to help police and prosecutors investigate the ‘enormous conspiracy’ surrounding illegal hacking because he wanted ‘to begin my life again with a clean slate’.
Evans signed a deal with the Crown Prosecution Service in which he agreed to cooperate with the investigation and give evidence at the phone
‘Even the office cat knew’
hacking trial in the hope of getting a reduced sentence for his own role.
He told lawyers that hacking was an ‘open secret’ at the News of the World and that the tabloid’s former editor Andy Coulson ‘knows exactly what went on on his watch’.
Evans told the court he was an unwilling hacker but felt he had no choice but to continue because of the pressure he was under when his career began to stall. He started drinking in the afternoons and taking cocaine, he said.
Evans has previously admitted two convictions linked to his ‘extensive’ drug use.
He said the fall-out from the scandal had left him needing therapy for 18 months, saying: ‘Carrying an enormous secret and delving illegally into the lives of people who didn’t deserve it made me unhappy.’
Timothy Langdale, for Coulson, suggested that Evans had willingly hacked phones because he was a ‘failing journalist’. Evans conceded he had hacked ‘to get stories to keep my head above water’, and said Coulson had known about stories generated from hacking, joking that ‘even the office cat knew’ what was going on.
Mr Langdale suggested Evans had only made potentially damaging allegations about Coulson’s involvement after he had received legal advice that he would be ‘a good candidate for getting immunity from prosecution’ if he gave police information about senior journalists.
However, the CPS refused to give him full immunity from prosecution over fears that striking such a deal would make his evidence ‘almost worthless’.
He accepted a deal in which the CPS will give full details of his cooperation to the judge when he appears for sentencing.
Evans has admitted hacking at the Sunday Mirror and the News of the World, conspiring to commit misconduct and lying in a witness statement.
Coulson denies charges of conspiring to hack phones and commit misconduct. All seven defendants in the trial, including former Sun and News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks, deny all the charges against them.
The trial continues.