Hugh Grant Settles Privacy Case Against 'The Sun,' But He's Not Happy About It

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | April 17, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | April 17, 2024 |

Hugh Grant has spent many years going up against the British press over their dirty tactics, including phone hacking and bribery. During the massive nationwide hacking revelations that led to the shutdown of News of the World and a public inquiry, Grant was at the forefront of demanding justice and long-term changes from the notoriously scurrilous UK tabloids. He has received apologies and retractions from the papers before, but his latest battle has taken a different turn.

This week, Grant settled his privacy case against the publisher of The Sun, Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers. As reported by the BBC, Grant reached a settlement on Wednesday regarding allegations of ‘unlawful information gathering’ by NGN against him. He has long maintained that The Sun hacked his phone and also burgled his home and blagged medical records from hospitals. Grant was expected to go to court in January 2025 with his case, but he has now taken the settlement. But he wants everyone to know that this is not a victory for Murdoch. Rather, it’s another reminder that the law is not in favour of victims unless they have enough wealth to go up against one of the world’s most callous billionaires.

Via Twitter, he shared a thread explaining why he took the settlement and what he refuses to ‘let this be hush money.’ Click on the tweet for the full thread and context.

For anyone who has been interested in my lawsuit against the Sun, the news is that I’ve had to settle my claim out of court before it gets to trial. A 🧵…

— Hugh Grant (@HackedOffHugh) April 17, 2024

‘As is common with entirely innocent people, they are offering me an enormous sum of money to keep this matter out of court,’ Grant wrote. ‘I don’t want to accept this money or settle. I would love to see all the allegations that they deny tested in court. 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. My lawyers tell me that that is exactly what would most likely happen here. Rupert Murdoch’s lawyers are very expensive. So even if every allegation is proven in court, I would still be liable for something approaching £10 million in costs. I’m afraid I am shying at that fence.’

This is, as Grant notes, how the tabloids get away with so much here (that and piss-poor self-regulation controls via Ofcom, which are ineffective to the point of absurdity.) You play it out in the courts for years, bleed your opposition dry, then force them to take the money. There are very few people with the financial resources to take on Murdoch’s empire. Basically, you have to be Elon Musk or J.K. Rowling, and they’re more concerned with using their wealth to silence the press too.

Actress Sienna Miller faced this exact conundrum when she took The Sun to court after accusing them of hacking her phones and paying a ‘medical records tracer’ to get details of a 2005 pregnancy she later aborted. After also taking the settlement, she said that she had wanted to pursue her case to a full trial, but that option was not available to people without ‘countless millions.’ If even successful Hollywood stars don’t have the cash to pull it off, it speaks volumes to the deeply crooked system at play. Remember, the British press didn’t just hack the phones of famous people. Look up Millie Dowler, the murdered teenager.

This is also what makes Prince Harry’s victory against another tabloid company, Mirror Group Newspapers, last year such a big deal. We just don’t see this happen in the UK. You need royalty money to tackle it. A judge ruled that Harry’s phone was targeted between 2003 and 2009 and 15 of 33 sample articles were ‘the product of phone hacking […] or the product of other unlawful information gathering.’

Grant has said that his settlement money will be ‘repurposed via groups like Hacked Off into the general campaign to expose the worst excesses of our oligarch-owned press.’