Press kept me and children under siege, says Rowling
They said they were besieged, lied about, and spat at – the Leveson inquiry hears more accusations of press harassment from JK Rowling, Max Mosley and Sienna Miller.
Harry Potter author JK Rowling focused mainly on her constant battle to keep her children out of the press, despite numerous attempts by photographers to take photos of them.
“I tried hard to abide by what I thought was the unwritten code,” she said, explaining that she thought that by keeping her children out of the public eye their privacy would be respected.
She told the inquiry: “Where children are concerned, it’s my personal belief that it’s not complex at all. They deserve privacy. They have no choice who their parents are.”
She complained to the Press Complaints Commission when her eight-year-old daughter was photographed with a long lens from a boat, as the family sat on a beach. The complaint was upheld.
Ms Rowling described a series of incidents where she was trapped in her home by photographers, including after the birth of her children, when she felt “like being under seige or being held hostage – it was impossible to go out.”
One day she found a note from a journalist in her young daughter’s schoolbag, leaving her feeling very angry. “It’s very difficult to say how angry I felt that my five-year-old daughter’s school was no longer a place of complete security from journalists.”
Like other witnesses, she said that taking on the papers brought its own difficulties: “If you lock horns with them, you can expect some form of retribution.”
‘I wanted to prove they were liars’
Earlier, former Formula One boss Max Mosley gave evidence and recounted his battle against the News of the World, when they falsely accused him of taking part in a “Nazi-themed” orgy.
In 2008 he won a high court case and damages of £60,000 against the News of the World for falsely claiming that an orgy he attended in London had a Nazi theme. He later lost a European court fight to force newspapers to warn people before exposing their private lives.
He told the Leveson inquiry he decided to take on the newspaper, even though his lawyer warned him it could cost him a million pounds if he lost and would lead to his private life being discussed in open court: “Indeed by going to court I was augmenting, to a degree, what the public already knew about it.”
But he said that his own wealth made it possible to challenge the story and he wanted the opportunity to face the journalists in court. “What they had done was so outrageous, I wanted to get these people into the witness box and prove they were liars,” he told the inquiry.
He then said that when he challenged the story and began legal proceedings, “The entire resources of News International were deployed to destroy me.”
Mr Mosley, counsel for the court Robert Jay, and Lord Leveson discussed at length the tactics used by News of the World to get the women involved to talk to them. News of the World reporter Neville Thurbeck wrote to the women saying that they would be paid for talking and would be given anonymity if they cooperated. But if they chose not to, their faces would be revealed.
Mr Mosley described the tactic as blackmail: “Three of them had very serious positions. One of them was a serious scientists, another had a position in health care. They were all terribly at risk. The admirable thing is that they did not submit to it.”
At the end of the discussion he made a plea for changes to the law, forcing newspapers to submit stories to a judge before publishing. The “Nazi” claim was published without him being given any warning.
I felt like I was living in some kind of video game. Sienna Miller
“You work all your life to try to achieve something useful. For however long I live now, that’s what people think of me when they hear my name.”
The court also heard this morning from the actress Sienna Miller, who complained about being “relentlessly pursued by about 10 to 15 men almost daily, anything from being spat at or verbally abused”.
“I was 21 and at midnight I would be running down a dark street on my own with 10 big men chasing me. The fact that they had cameras meant that was legal, but take away the cameras and what have you got? A pack of men chasing a woman and that’s obviously intimidating.”
Ms Miller told Lord Leveson she had begun to be suspicious of close friends and family after private information began to appear in the press, as a result of phone hacking.
“I felt like I was living in some kind of video game,” she said. “People were pre-empting every move as a result of accessing private information.”
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