The Leveson Inquiry has been wonderful television. It really has. Moments ago, we had Max Moseley talking about doing ‘sieg heils’ at some excellently odd party or somesuch and we also had Steve Coogan talking about his misdeeds.
Another of the stars involved is Sienna Miller who has claimed that her emails were hacked into by… well… someone… on behalf of journalists.
Sienna Miller’s involvement, of course, being particularly odd what with her not being particularly famous for much, other than her sex life. Either way, she gave evidence and made some pretty damning claims.
The actress was called to give evidence to the Leveson Inquiry which has come about after the whole News of the World phone-hacking thing that gripped everyone for about 10 minutes earlier in the year, climaxing with a hilarious pie-in-the-face of Rupert Murdoch and his young bride thwacking some bozo over the noggin.
Of course, Sienna has accepted ?100,000 in damages after editors at the newspaper accepted that they’d invaded her privacy.
But how? Well, during her testimony to the committee, she stated that her email password was discovered in the notes of a private investigator working for the tabloid. Her messages had been hacked into in 2008 (quick! Delete all those n00dz we sent you! QUICK!).
Apparently, the police showed Miller a stack of notes seized from investigator Glenn Mulcaire’s home and she was pretty shocked (okay, really bloody shocked) to find a whole bunch of her personal details, including passwords to her mobile phone answering machine and her email account.
She told the hearing:
“My password for my email that was later used to hack my email in 2008 was on these notes.”
Miller also revealed that her friends and family had been targeted by Mulcaire, adding:
“I felt terrible. People who had never done anything remotely public had been under constant surveillance by this man.”
This resulted in Miller accusing her family and friends of selling stories, because she was so paranoid about how journalists were obtaining intimate information after repeated changes of phone number.
She said:
“I am very lucky, I have a very tight group of friends and a very supportive family, and to this date no-one has ever sold a story on me… But it was baffling how certain pieces of information kept coming out and the first initial steps I took were to change my mobile number. And then I changed it again and again, and I ended up changing it three times in three months.”
“Naturally, having changed my number and being pretty convinced that it couldn’t be as a result of hacking, I accused my friends and family of selling stories and they accused each other as well… I feel terrible that I would even consider accusing people of betraying me like that, especially being people who I know would rather die than betray me.”
As grim as this all is, by Jove it’s juicy!
You can watch the Leveson Inquiry here and pretend you’re all clever.