The Washington Post publisher and CEO Will Lewis is caught in a legal endgame centered on a scandal that seems never to go away, the industrial-scale hacking practiced in the newsrooms of Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids from the mid-1990s until it was exposed in 2011.
Lewis was never involved in the hacking. The legal action involves his alleged role in the frantic efforts of Murdoch and his top executives to purge all the records of the crime. He has so far refused to make any comment to counter the allegations.
But the pressure on him to respond is growing because the lawyers representing victims of the hacking have asked the presiding judge in London to admit into their lawsuit new witnesses’ testimonies gathered during the last year of discovery. The judge is expected to rule on this soon.
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But the pressure is even greater than that: time is running out. The defending Murdoch entity, News Group Newspapers, NGN, faces the risk that if it cannot settle out of court the remaining 40 or so cases (more than 250 have been settled) the cases go to a trial in court in January 2025, in which case the claimants’ charges would be aired in public.
Both sides have effective coercive powers. The claimants have built a detailed narrative of widespread wrongdoing; NGN can afford to suppress that narrative with settlements so generous that they exceed anything that could be won after a trial, a tactic that was recently conceded to have worked in the case brought by Hugh Grant.
The most formidable claimant left is Prince Harry. How much longer he will play this game is in question. It has been a long-declared aim for him to see the architects of so much pain for him (and his brother and late mother) exposed in court. I understand that he may have already received an offer from NGN, but it is likely that he will go to the brink of timing before settling.
The strength of Harry’s case is reflected in the application to update the lawsuit now being reviewed by the judge. The Daily Beast has reviewed the document giving the details of the application.
It should be made clear that, under English civil law, these allegations in the document are regarded as submissions to the judge, not evidence. That can be established only in open court, through evidence given under oath by witnesses, should the cases come to trial. Another caveat is that as convincing as the new charges may seem, in the absence of rebuttal by the NGN lawyers or public statements by those named, this is a one-sided account.
A spokesman for NGN, responding to previous reporting of the new allegations, said, “The claimants have now sought to introduce accusations in the civil court against many current and former journalists, staff, and senior executives of News International in a scurrilous and cynical attack on their integrity.”
Around sixty amendments are being requested; the judge may allow some and not others. For those that are allowed, NGN would have to amend their defense to plead to them. (That does not rule out the possibility that the submissions denied by the judge could nonetheless reappear as evidence in a courtroom.)
The document alleges that over several months in 2011, Will Lewis was a decisive force at the center of a cover-up involving the purging of incriminating emails, documents, and computer hard drives.
Lewis has thus far refused to comment on the hacking case beyond what he told the Post in a fall 2023 profile pegged to his joining the newspaper: “I did whatever I could to preserve journalistic integrity. I took a view very early on that I’m never going to talk about it. And it’s either right or wrong that I’ve done that.”
Lewis joined the Murdoch newspaper business in September 2010, as group general manager. On Jan. 26, 2011, the Metropolitan Police launched Operation Weeting, an investigation into phone hacking at the News of the World, Murdoch’s best-selling Sunday tabloid.
Not only the police were involved. A group of members of parliament were beginning their own investigation. But there were no unannounced police raids on the newspaper offices and plant at Wapping in East London. The police and the politicians arranged visits in advance.
The two tabloids, the News of the World and the Sun, had cultivated a cozy relationship with the Metropolitan Police. Confidential briefings on criminal cases were leaked to the papers by corrupt police officers who were paid for them. Senior officers, on retirement, were hired for generous sums to write columns on crime and national security. Operation Weeting displayed no sense of urgency.
The new allegations suggest that Murdoch’s top executives moved quickly to take advantage of that tardiness and remove more than 30 million emails, computer hard drives, and documents before the investigators turned up:
“Mr Lewis gave approval for the deletion of all emails from 2007 on 3 February 2011 (one week after the start of Operation Weeting) which deletions were completed on 8 February 2011, the day before NI [News International] met the MPs to discuss what data was available, and the Claimants contend that this was a deliberate plan by Mr Lewis… to prevent the MPs from obtaining evidence of phone-hacking, other unlawful activity and the cover-up that took place in 2007. The Claimants rely on the fact that Mr Lewis withheld from the police the fact that millions of emails had been deleted since 14 January 2011, for 6 months.”
Another part of the document describes an alleged scapegoating of an IT contractor, Darren Elmes, following a request from the MPs for a hard drive that contained an email chain they wanted to retrieve. The hard drive had disappeared and NGN executives suggested that Elmes was a “disgruntled employee” who had a motive to steal the hard drive.
As a result, according to the claim, Elmes’ home was raided and searched without result, and he was found innocent.
According to the claims statement, some emails were not deleted and were transferred to a laptop that became known as “the extraction laptop” where they were subject to further selective deletion. The document claims: “Later, in July 2011, the hard drive was found, together with another laptop, during a search by the MPs in a floor safe hidden under a vanity unit in the annexe to Rebekah Brooks’s office.”
These claims will not be tested in open court if the remaining litigants settle with NGN. The NGN lawyers have witness statements already made by the Murdoch executives cited, including Lewis, at a time when it seemed some of the cases would go to trial. Darren Elmes has also made a witness statement for the claimants.
A source with deep knowledge of the cases told me: “The claim documents are not the actual documents underlying the allegations. The real danger for NGN comes when there’s a trial because then the media can see it, the police can see it, the victims can see it.
“That’s the evidence. People will have given evidence on oath. And then the judge could say, as he did in the cases involving the Daily Mirror, I find the News Group witnesses were lying.”
Would criminal prosecutions follow?
“If the police don’t do anything, and there will be cause to do something, there could be a judicial review, or victims could bring private prosecutions. So there are ways of getting there.”
In a statement made to Prospect magazine, in response to reporting last week by the former Guardian reporter Nick Davies, who first revealed the scale of the hacking, a spokesman for NGN said, “These proceedings have now been going on for over 15 years and NGN is seeking to bring them to a close. Between 2011-2015 a large-scale police investigation resulted in the trials of many individuals in the criminal courts. Corporate liability was also investigated at length and, in 2015, the Crown Prosecution Service concluded that there was no evidence to support charges against the company.”
In fact, NGN is arguing that the litigation has been going on so long that yet another round of new claims should not be allowed: “The recent vacation of the January 2024 trial should not precipitate another cycle of extensive amendments and consequential amendments.” They cite a statement made by a judge in 2018: “Time before the trial is not an excuse for spending hundreds of thousands of pounds beefing up cases, dotting every i, crossing every t.”
That argument was successfully countered by the litigants’ lawyers, who argued that the decisive time period should not be from when the alleged offenses were committed but from the point when they were discovered—in other words, if the cited actions were important but previously unknown they should be put on the record.
The latest claims reflect the fact that more than 200 journalists, executives, and private investigators have been deposed, filling in many of the gaps—but far from all of them—in the search for truth.
Hacking was a viral worm that poisoned British journalism over a long period. It was incubated in a Murdoch newsroom where it quickly became contagious. It spread widely, corrupting editors who saw in it an irresistible source of scoops that violated the privacy of many hundreds of people, high and low. And it is part of the malignant legacy of Rupert Murdoch and a tabloid newsroom culture that he uniquely created and oversaw.
