LONDON--News Corp.'s (NWS, NWSA, NWS.AU) U.K. newspaper unit
said it settled another 17 phone-hacking claims filed by various
public personalities in the U.K., including Sarah Ferguson, the
Duchess of York; singer James Blunt and "Doctor Who" actor
Christopher Eccleston.
The settlements, read out in a London court on Friday, are the
latest fallout from a long-running scandal involving journalists'
illegal interception of voice-mail messages. The sizes of the
settlements weren't disclosed.
Revelations of widespread phone-hacking at the News of the World
tabloid prompted News Corp. to shut the newspaper in 2011. News
Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch has called the scandal a "major black
eye" for the company.
Earlier this year, News Corp. said it had settled the majority
of the dozens of civil lawsuits filed against it by victims of
phone hacking. Those who have settled include the actors Hugh Grant
and Jude Law, soccer player Ashley Cole and British politician John
Prescott.
In a statement Friday, Ms. Ferguson's lawyer, Paul Tweed, said
News Corp.'s U.K. newspaper unit had acknowledged that Ms. Ferguson
"had been the victim of unlawful interception of her voice-mail
messages for a number of years dating back to the year 2000." He
added that Ms. Ferguson "has this morning received a comprehensive
and categoric apology by way of a formal statement in open court,
together with a significant payment in damages and her legal
costs." He said the size of the settlement was confidential.
He added: "Notwithstanding this successful outcome, my client
remains extremely concerned that questions beyond the scope of
these legal proceedings still need to be answered in relation to
other instances of inappropriate and extreme intrusion into her
private life."
In a statement, News Corp.'s U.K. newspaper unit said it has
"taken a range of measures across the board to identify what went
wrong at the company, to compensate victims with minimal delay and
distress and to ensure the same mistakes never happen again. We are
pleased to have made further progress today."
News Corp. owns Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall
Street Journal and this newswire.
The phone-hacking scandal dates back to the arrests in 2006 of a
News of the World reporter and a private investigator on the
company's payroll. The two men were sentenced in 2007 after
pleading guilty to illegally intercepting voice-mail messages.
The company long asserted that phone hacking had been limited to
those two individuals. But later, evidence suggesting the practice
was more widespread surfaced in U.K. courts, and the scandal boiled
over when it emerged that the News of the World had hacked the
telephone of teenager Milly Dowler after her disappearance in 2002.
She was later found dead. After the news broke, News Corp.
acknowledged widespread wrongdoing and shut down the News of the
World.
-Write to Jeanne Whalen at jeanne.whalen@wsj.com
Subscribe to WSJ: http://online.wsj.com?mod=djnwires