From secretary to scandal, Rebekah Brooks’ media career
In a career covering more than two decades, Rebekah Brooks has made a lasting impression on the tabloid media landscape, Channel 4 News looks back at her achievements.
Rebekah Brooks has risen a long way in the 22 years since her first job as a secretary at News International. She is one of the few women to have edited a national tabloid newspaper and has been a constant fixture in the tabloid landscape for over a decade.
The 43-year-old became the youngest person to edit a national newspaper when she took over in 2000 at the helm of the News of the World – the newspaper where she had begun her journalistic career 11 years earlier.
Rebekah Brooks has reduced a Prime Minister to tears (Gordon Brown) and told another troublesome politician (Chris Bryant) she was surprised he wasn’t out cruising for gay sex.
She is one of at least eight News International executives and senior journalists to have testified to Parliament in the past decade. Brooks’ last appearance before the committee in 2003 did produce one revelation that has already come back to haunt her.
Read more on the News of the World phone hacking scandal in our special report
Agressive approach
In 2002 she married Ross Kemp, at the time one of the UK’s best-known actors, courtesy of his starring role in the BBC soap EastEnders.
Three years later, in November 2005, the couple made headlines when it emerged Brooks (or Wade as she then still was, having refused to take Kemp’s surname) had been arrested after an alleged assault on her husband.
In the meantime she had been promoted by News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch, who owns the News International stable, to editorship of The Sun, Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper.
Mrs Brooks was known at the Sun for her aggressive approach, which helped maintain its best-selling newspaper status.
As a reward, in 2009 Mr Murdoch promoted her again, to become News International’s Chief Executive.
As such, she took operational control over the Australian-born media magnate’s UK stable of newspapers, which also includes The Times and Sunday Times.
An Observer profile from 2009 quoted a friend of Brooks as saying that News International would go down before Brooks did. News of her resignation then would seem to be nothing short of astonishing.
