Princess Diana’s former butler and confidante, Paul Burrell, has received an apology and compensation from the editor of The Daily Mirror tabloid for hacking into his phone voicemail, sources close to him said Tuesday.
Source: AFP
Before the High Court in London, the Mirror Group Newspapers accepted responsibility for the hack between 1995 and 2008, beginning during the period of the divorce of Lady Diana and the current King Carlos III and lasting well beyond the death of the princess in 1997 in Paris.
Presenting the “sincere apologies” of his client, the lawyer of this media group, Alexander Vakil, acknowledged “the suffering caused by obtaining private information and access to his voice mail.”
Vakil stated that the editor of the Mirror promised “never to have repeated such acts”. The amount of compensation paid, on the other hand, was not specified.
The British press was spattered in the early 2000s by a wide-ranging messaging scandal that led to the 2011 closure of the News of the World, while the Mirror was sentenced in 2015 to pay record damages to several celebrities.
Paul Burrell’s lawyer, Francis Leonard, highlighted on Tuesday the effects of the illegal wiretapping admitted by the left-wing tabloid: “During Diana’s lifetime, the defendant’s activities caused the relationship (between Burrell and the princess) to deteriorate, as she mistakenly believed that highly sensitive personal information was being leaked to the press.”
The wiretapping would also have disturbed his relations with his defense when he was accused of stealing hundreds of Diana’s personal belongings when she died, charges of which he was acquitted.
In addition to listening to your voice mail, private detectives were hired at least three times by the Mirror to obtain information from the former butlerspecified his defense.
