I didn’t want my son to hear secret about his father
Elizabeth Hurley wept as she told a High Court trial she wanted to keep secret the fact that her son’s father claimed she named the boy after the devil.
Her son, Damian, was comforted by the Duke of Sussex during Hurley’s evidence at the privacy trial on Thursday.
During her evidence, she denied being deployed on a “secret mission” to help recruit a senior journalist to assist the privacy case.
She also said she had “probably” been persuaded to join another privacy case, against Mirror Group Newspapers, by the “puppy dog eyes” of her former boyfriend Hugh Grant.
Hurley sobbed as she said: “I was mortified that my son was some day going to read all this stuff and I felt bad that this is being regurgitated today.”
Hurley, 60, Prince Harry, 41, Sir Elton John, 78, and his husband, David Furnish, 63, claim they are victims of unlawful information gathering by Associated Newspapers, the publisher of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. Associated denies wrongdoing.
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Prince Harry at court
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Hurley’s public announcement in 2001 that she was pregnant with Bing’s child, and his public statement casting doubt on his paternity, led to a mass of media coverage.
The model confided in Furnish during a conversation at John’s mansion in Windsor, Berkshire, that Bing accused her of naming her son after the devil child character in the 1978 horror movie Omen II, the court was told.
Hurley, who played the character of the Devil in the 2000 film Bedazzled, said their conversation must have been bugged because Furnish would not have leaked the information. “I did not want my son to read it,” she said. “I do not think that David Furnish came downstairs and called the hotline at the Daily Mail and told them that. It was so hurtful … I spoke to so few people.”
Hurley told the court the information “could have been provided by Steve Bing, but you cannot ask him because he is dead”. Bing died by suicide in 2020, aged 55.
The model, who wore a deep green, knitted dress, said she was unaware that the US magazine Vanity Fair reported details of her conversation with Furnish about her son’s name before the story appeared in the Daily Mail.
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Hurley said in her written evidence: “The Mail’s unlawful acts against me involve landline-tapping my phones and recording my live telephone conversations, placing surreptitious mics on my home windows, stealing my medical information when I was pregnant with Damian and other monstrous, staggering things.
“Above all, it was the discovery that the Mail had tapped the landlines of my home phones and tape-recorded my live telephone conversations that devastated me.
“I had not come across this brutal invasion of privacy in either of my two battles with the other newspapers. I felt crushed. It represented the ultimate violation of privacy.”
Hurley wiped away tears again when she described reading the witness statement of a private detective called Gavin Burrows, in which he confessed to carrying out bugging, interception of landline calls and voicemail hacking on behalf of Associated.
“It was deeply hurtful, the details in it were very painful to read,” she said. Burrows has said in a witness statement that the statement referred to by Hurley was “forged” and he has denied working for Associated.
Hurley denied being deployed on a “secret mission” to help recruit a senior journalist to assist their privacy case.
Associated Newspapers claims documents show Hurley should have known she had a potential claim in 2015, alleging her claim in 2022 was out of time.
An “action list” was prepared in early 2015 by Graham Johnson, a legal researcher for the celebrities’ lawyers. A passage read: “Deploy ElizH to help HG [Hugh Grant] to speak to Dominic L.” Hurley said she knew Dominic Lawson as the editor of The Sunday Telegraph at the time.
“To deploy me on a secret mission is preposterous,” she said. “I do not know who Mr Johnson is.”
In October 2015 Evan Harris, then the director of Hacked Off, wrote to Grant and Johnson saying Grant would keep “LH” informed about developments.
Johnson wrote a document titled Operation Bluebird in December 2016 stating that Hurley, Grant and his girlfriend at the time, Jemima Khan, were part of a “victim group” who had evidence to make a claim against the Daily Mail.
Hurley said: “Nobody was keeping me informed about anything, ever.”
Antony White KC, representing Associated, told the court many of the articles complained of contained information from the “leaky” social circles of the celebrities’ friends.
Harry said during his evidence on Wednesday: “My social circles were not leaky.” He left the courtroom after listening to two hours of Hurley’s evidence, and visited Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon at the House of Lords on Thursday afternoon. Lawrence, whose son Stephen was murdered in a racist attack, has not attended any of the first four days of the trial.
The trial continues.