Actor Hugh Grant has settled a lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., the publisher of The Sun newspaper, out of court.
The trial was to have determined whether the News Corp. tabloid carried out unlawful information gathering, including tapping Grant’s landline phone, bugging his car and breaking into his home. But Grant in a post on X, formerly Twitter, said he had decided to “settle my claim out of court before it goes to trial,” to avoid possibly heavy court costs.
“As is common with entirely innocent people, they are offering me an enormous sum of money to keep this matter out of court. I don’t want to accept this money or settle. I would love to see all the allegations that they deny tested in court,” Grant said in an X thread, without disclosing the size of his out-of-court settlement.
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“But the rules around civil litigation mean that if I proceed to trial and the court awards me damages that are even a penny less than the settlement offer, I would have to pay the legal costs of both sides,” the actor added.
Grant earlier settled a phone-hacking case with News Group’s former publication News of the World after that newspaper shuttered in 2011 amid a historic hacking scandal involving intercepted voicemails of a murdered girl, celebrities, athletes, politicians and members of the Royal Family. “Rupert Murdoch has spent over £1billon in damages to claimants and in lawyers’ fees, settling over 1,500 claims in this way. He seems remarkably determined that there shouldn’t be a trial of the facts,” Grant argued.
He added “Murdoch’s settlement money has a stink and I refuse to let this be hush money,” and so would use the proceeds of his settlement to “expose the worst excesses of our oligarch-owned press,” he said.
In late 2023, Prince Harry won a partial victory in his legal battle against British tabloid publisher Mirror Group when a court awarded the British royal $180,000 (140,000 pounds) in damages in his own phone-hacking case.
Prince Harry accused Mirror Group tabloids of hacking his phone and other illegal activities aimed at finding out private information that could then be turned into news stories. He claimed he was the victim of more than 140 instances of illegal news gathering.
