Sienna Miller, J.K. Rowling testify in tabloid-journalism inquiry

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Actress Sienna Miller and author J.K. Rowling added their voices Thursday to growing testimony regarding British tabloids’ information-gathering practices, with Rowling saying she’d found a note from a journalist in her then 5-year-old daughter’s backpack, and Miller recalling being surprised and even spat at by paparazzi trying to get a reaction on camera.

Miller accepted about $160,000, an apology and an admission of phone-hacking guilt from News of the World in June after agreeing to end her breach-of-privacy lawsuit. That publication shut down in July in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal.

‘For a number of years I was relentlessly pursued by 10 to 15 men, almost daily,’ Miller said Thursday. ‘Spat at, verbally abused.’ She said she’d first accused friends and family of leaking information before learning her phone had been hacked, and felt paranoid, as if she were living in some sort of video game.

‘I wanted to understand the extent of the info they had on me,’ Miller said on the stand. ‘I wanted to know who knew, who knew all of this information, who had access to my telephone numbers, who had been listening to me.’ Miller was hot news while she was involved with and engaged to Jude Law.

Rowling alleged she’d been stalked by paps during both her pregnancies, and said coverage would increase after she complained to publications about made-up details in stories about her, according to BusinessWeek.

‘If you lock horns with them in this way, if you protest or make a complaint, then you can expect some form of retribution fairly quickly,’ the ‘Harry Potter’ writer said.

Hugh Grant on Monday accused the Mail on Sunday and Daily Mail of hacking into his cellphone messages; the company that owns those papers immediately denied any wrongdoing, saying its information had come from contacts close to the actor and from women with which he’d been involved.

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The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

-- Christie D’Zurilla
Twitter.com/dzurillaville