By Kevin McCauley
Rebekah Brooks, former CEO of News International, and Andy Coulson, ex-editor of the now shuttered News of the World and one-time communications chief of U.K. prime minister David Cameron, today were charged by Britain’s crown prosecution service in the phone hacking case of murdered teenager Milly Dowler and more than 600 other people.
Alison Levitt, legal advisor to the director of public prosecutions, said they will be charged with “conspiring to intercept communications without legal authority.” Those communications were the “voicemail messages of well-known people and/or those associated with them.”
Brooks, who also edited the NOTW, issued a statement to deny all charges. “I did not authorize, nor was I aware of, phone hacking under my editorship,” she said. “I am distressed and angry that the CPS have reached this decision when they knew all the facts and were in a position to stop the case at this stage.”
She finds the Dowler hacking allegations “particularly upsetting, not only as it is untrue but because I have spent my journalistic career campaigning for victims of crime.”
Coulson, who will appear with Brooks in court on Aug. 16, vowed to “fight these allegations.”
Brooks was a key deputy of News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch. He resigned from the boards of his company’s British newspapers last week in what a spokesperson called a “corporate housecleaning exercise.”
Murdoch shut the NOTW following news of the Dowler hacking. He personally apologized to the girl’s parents and agreed to a multi-million dollar payment. |