Elizabeth Hurley describes 'monstrous' privacy invasion by Daily Mail in British media hacking case

LONDON (AP) — Elizabeth Hurley accused the publisher of the Daily Mail on Thursday of tapping her phones, putting microphones outside her windows and stealing her medical records among “other monstrous, staggering things” during testimony in a celebrity-studded privacy invasion lawsuit.

“The best way I can describe it is like there is someone peeping into your life and into your home,” the model and actor said. It “makes me feel as if my private life had been violated by violent intruders — that there had been sinister thieves in my home all along and that I had been living with them completely unaware.”

Hurley was the second witness to testify in the lawsuit that includes co-claimants Prince Harry and Elton John, and four others who allege that Associated Newspapers Ltd. hired private investigators to unlawfully snoop on them over two decades.

Harry showed up to show his support for Hurley’s testimony the day after he choked up in the witness box as he spoke of the emotional toll his battle against the British media had taken on him and his family.

The publisher denies the claims and has called them preposterous. It said that the articles were reported on with legitimate sources and many will be named by employees at the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday in the company's defense during the nine-week trial in London's High Court.

Hurley, who like the prince brought similar phone hacking lawsuits against the publishers of the Daily Mirror and The Sun, said that she was unaware of similar allegations against the Mail until she was told in 2020 that Gavin Burrows, a former private eye, purportedly said that he had stolen her information at the behest of the newspapers.

Burrows has since disavowed that sworn statement and said he never worked for the Mail.

Hurley claims 15 articles about her between 2002 and 2011 relied on unlawful information-gathering. Several were about the 2002 birth of her son, Damian, and the paternity fight with his father, the late film producer Steve Bing.

“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,” Hurley said.

She said she had hoped her son, now a model and actor himself who sat in the courtroom, would never see those articles.

“I felt really mortified that my son would be able to read all this stuff one day, and I feel really bad that that day is today when all this stuff is being regurgitated," she said as she became upset when shown some of those articles in court. “Yet again, everyone’s privacy is being invaded in this terrible way, and I feel very helpless about that.”