Hugh Grant Accuses Another Tabloid of Phone-Hacking

Says British "Mail on Sunday" eavesdropped on his voicemail

Hugh Grant blasted the press in a London courtroom Monday, and not just Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloids.

The actor, testifying before a grand jury about the phone-hacking scandal that rocked News Corp and caused the British News of the World to shutter, spoke out against another publication for the first time: the Mail on Sunday, The Associated Press reports.

A 2007 story published in the Mail claimed his relationship with Jemima Khan was "on the rocks" and that he was having flirtatious late-night phone calls with a film studio executive. Grant said the story was untrue but surmised reporters must have based it off of voice mails left for him by a "plummy voiced" woman who was actually an executive's assistant, Grant said. He sued for libel and won.

Grant said he had no hard evidence, but added "I'd love to hear what the Daily Mail or the Sunday Mail's explanation of what the source was if it wasn't phone hacking."


In the two-and-half-hour testimony to the judge-led Leveson Inquiry, Grant detailed years of being chased down by tabloids since his first hit, Four Weddings and a Funeral, in 1994.

Grant has never been shy in taking on the press. The actor famously caught News of the World reporter Paul McMullen admitting to hacking his phone on tape and published transcripts in April. He and Khan won a court order against the News Corp tabloid in July.

The testimony, which The Associated Press called at time "charming and censorious," also included anecdotes about a mysterious break-in at his apartment and a time when he suspected reporters followed him into the emergency room earlier this year.

"I think no one would expect their medical records to be made public or to be appropriated by newspapers for commercial profit," he said. "That is fundamental to our British sense of decency."

Earlier in the courtroom, the parents of Milly Dowler, a murdered schoolgirl who's voicemail was hacked by the Mail on Sunday, also spoke out against the wrongdoing.

Selected Reading: Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, The Telegraph on YouTube

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