“News of the World” Trial: Hacking Victims May Have Included Prince Harry
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Matt Cardy/Getty Images(LONDON) — It turns out no one was safe from the News of the World hacking scandal, not even the Royal Family.
How else could you explain running an unmatchable story on a panicked Prince Harry calling his private secretary, begging for help on a college essay?
The intercepted message allegedly revealed Prince Harry saying, “I have got most of the stuff but if you have got any extra information or websites that you know of, please, please, please email it to me or text it to me.”
But the tables have turned on the top editors of Rupert Murdoch’s shuttered London tabloid.
The hacking scandal closed Britain’s biggest selling newspaper in 2011.
The unfolding of the paper’s questionable practices forced Murdoch to shut down operations at the News of the World, triggered police investigations and led to the charges of more than 30 people from the tabloid as well as its sister paper, The Sun.
Now, the tabloid’s senior executives are in court facing criminal charges, including “conspiring to intercept voicemail messages.”
The News of the World‘s senior executives Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks are accused of stopping at nothing to get a story and putting themselves above the law to invade people’s private lives for the purpose of sensationalism and increased newspaper sales.
“I’m sure they just thought that nobody, nobody would catch them and even if they did catch them, nobody was going to do anything,” Mark Lewis, an attorney for hacking victims, told ABC News. “Nobody would taken them on, because if they did take them on, the revenge, the organization can hit back and hit back hard.”
Salacious secrets from Coulson and Brooks’ personal lives have bubbled to the surface.
This week, the court heard the pair had a secret six year love affair. The dalliance was proof, the prosecution alleges, that they conspired together to break the law.
Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio