Actress Sadie Frost told the High Court that information about a terminated pregnancy was illegally obtained by the Mail on Sunday.
Frost is one of seven people, including the Duke of Sussex, Sir Elton John, Baroness Doreen Lawrence and Liz Hurley, suing Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL) over allegations of unlawful information gathering.
[See full trial coverage here]
Her individual claim concerns 11 articles, including some related to her divorce from actor Jude Law.
The claim also concerns two “episodes” of unlawful information gathering which did not result in articles being published, including one in relation to her ectopic pregnancy.
ANL denies wrongdoing and is defending the claims.
In court on Monday, Frost repeatedly became emotional as she was cross-examined by barristers for the publisher.
She said: “There was obviously a price on my head. The Daily Mail had said they were interested in Sadie Frost.”
Frost continued in court that she knew “100%” that information behind some of the articles had been “hacked from my voicemails”, as they “were word for word” from her messages.
At one stage in cross-examination, Antony White KC, for ANL, suggested that members of Frost’s family providing information to the press “was likely to encourage” her friends to do the same.
She responded: “I don’t 100% agree with that.”
In a witness statement, Frost said she did not know she had a potential claim against the publisher until 2019, and was “mortified” when she was told her landline had been listened to as it was “a lifeline for me”.
She said: “The stories they wrote violated me, my friends and family, and my children who were still so small, and they made me believe that I could not trust anyone.”
She continued: “I am so angry that Associated did this to me and thought it was okay to profit from someone going through so much pain without a thought for me or my children and the suffering they were causing me and us all.”
She added that she believed ANL “must be held accountable”.
In written submissions, Frost’s barrister, David Sherborne, said that one of the “episodes” in her claim related to an unpublished article in relation to Frost’s ectopic pregnancy.
Mr Sherborne said that Frost discovered she was pregnant in 2003, which was unplanned and which Frost later terminated.
The barrister continued that Frost did not tell her relatives about the termination, only telling her partner Jackson Scott, who was the father of the unborn child, and “maybe also one of her very close friends”.
He also said that the then-showbiz editor of the Mail on Sunday, Katie Nicholl, had found out details about the pregnancy and the termination, which “must be from unlawful information gathering”.
The barrister added that Ms Nicholl’s notes referred to a private investigator from Express Locate International (ELI), who charged her over £400.
Mr White said in written submissions that Frost’s claims cannot succeed as it has been brought too late, with Mr White saying that it was “overwhelmingly likely” that she was” knew or could, as a matter of basic inference, have known” that she had a worthwhile claim before 2016.
The barrister continued that the fact that Frost had “positively chosen not to investigate” whether she had a claim did not mean it should succeed.
He also said that the claims were “wholly without any foundation in the evidence before the court” and were “based entirely on spurious and/or discredited information”, with the articles instead “sourced entirely legitimately”.
He said: “Ms Frost’s circle was and was known to be ‘leaky’ in the period when her marriage to Jude Law was in difficulty, and this and their subsequent divorce was frequently being reported in the media.”
He continued: “Members of Ms Frost’s family also regularly provided information to the media about Ms Frost’s and Mr Law’s private lives without any compunction.”
Mr White also said that the payments to ELI were not linked to Frost’s pregnancy, and the information was given to Ms Nicholl by a freelance journalist who had confidential sources close to the actress.
The trial before Mr Justice Nicklin is due to conclude in March, with a judgment in writing due at a later date.
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