Elizabeth Hurley handed “intimate” details about her private life to the media to further her career, her privacy trial has heard.
The barrister for Associated Newspapers said Hurley and other celebrities, including Prince Harry and Sir Elton John, were “clutching at straws” in their privacy trial.
The actress sat next to her son Damian at the High Court in London on Tuesday for the second day of her claim.
Prince Harry was also at court on Tuesday
TOBY MELVILLE/REUTERS
Hurley, 60, claims she was the victim of unlawful information gathering by Associated Newspapers for articles published in the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. She has complained about 15 articles published between 2001 and 2013, seven of which related to the dispute over her son’s paternity.
The privacy trial was told that Hurley claims her former partner, the US billionaire Steve Bing, had been “using the press” during their dispute over the paternity of her son.
The court heard there was enormous media coverage following her public announcement in 2001 that she was pregnant with Bing’s child and his public statement casting doubt on his paternity. A DNA test later confirmed that Bing, a businessman and film producer, was the father.
Antony White KC, representing Associated Newspapers, said in written submissions that it was reported that Damian was conceived at the home of John and his husband, David Furnish, two of the other claimants in the case.
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Hurley said in a witness statement she believed Bing and his supporters were “using the press … to manipulate the entire saga” and “leaked or placed [stories] to make him appear to be an accountable and responsible father”, the court heard.
Furnish supported Hurley’s account in his witness statement, saying: “We all believed it was Bing.”
Hurley added that leaks about her private life were “inevitable … and we always put them down to the leaky contractor or observer, someone who knew someone, nothing sinister or horrid but perhaps a mistaken indiscretion or gossip”.
White said in his opening statement that Hurley promoted her career by providing “private information about herself to the media, including as to intimate matters, and which would have led associates to consider it was acceptable to provide similar anecdotes and gossip about her to the press”.
Bing killed himself aged 55 by jumping from his 27th-floor apartment in Los Angeles in 2020.
John, 78, and Furnish, 63, are complaining about ten articles published between 2002 and 2015. They include reports relating their relationship with Hurley and of “tensions in the Royal Household” over plans for a memorial concert for Diana, Princess of Wales, and her sons’ hopes that John would be a headline act.
Another article, headlined “Elton: I’m the daddy”, in 2010, reported how John was named as the “father” and Furnish the “mother” in the official record following the surrogate birth of their son.
White said the information from the child’s birth certificate was provided by the Los Angeles local registrar’s office following a request from a journalist. The barrister said the celebrities’ references to payments to private investigators by journalists as evidence of wrongdoing were “examples of clutching at straws in the wind and seeking to bind them together in a way that has no proper analytical foundation”.
He said Hurley, John and Furnish “rely heavily on the allegations made” by one private investigator, Gavin Burrows, in a now “disavowed” witness statement.
Gavin Burrows, a private detective, has emerged as a key figure in the proceedings
BBC/EXPRESS ONLINE
David Sherborne, representing the celebrities, said Harry had detailed the “distress” and “paranoia” he had been caused. He said the duke “feels he has endured a sustained campaign of attacks against him for having had the temerity to stand up to Associated in the way that he has so publicly done”.
Harry and Hurley were the only claimants to attend court on Tuesday morning but did not return after the lunch break.
The trial continues.