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The mother of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence has said she felt she had been “taken for a fool” by the publisher of the Daily Mail, after she was told about allegations it had targeted her with unlawful information gathering techniques.
Appearing at the high court in London, Doreen Lawrence said she felt angry because of the trust she had placed in the Daily Mail, owing to its coverage of her son’s case.
Lady Lawrence is one of seven figures bringing legal action against Associated Newspapers Ltd (ANL) over alleged phone hacking, “blagging” and other forms of unlawful information gathering.
The other claimants are Prince Harry, Sir Elton John and his husband, David Furnish, the actors Elizabeth Hurley and Sadie Frost, and the former Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes.
Giving evidence, Lawrence said she felt angry about how she had been treated, accusing the publisher of using her and her son’s case “to give them credibility of supporting a black family”.
Lawrence’s involvement in the case is of particular significance, given the Daily Mail’s repeated campaigning for justice for her son since his murder in 1993. Paul Dacre, the Daily Mail’s former long-serving editor, has held it up as one of the newspaper’s most important campaigns.
ANL denies all the allegations of unlawful information gathering, describing them as “lurid” and “preposterous”. Lawrence is bringing her claims against ANL in relation to five articles published between 1997 and 2007.
In a written statement to the court, she accused the publisher of “landline tapping me, blagging me and hacking into my voicemails, monitoring my bank account and phone bills, targeting me with hidden electronic surveillance, and making corrupt payments to serving police officers to steal information about the murder investigations into Stephen’s death whilst pretending to be my friend”.
“We had trusted the Mail and worked with the Mail for 25 years,” she said. “I felt like I had been taken for a fool. I still do. I don’t trust them at all any more after what they have done to me.
“I am a victim all over again, but by people who I thought were my allies and friends. I am being made to fight when all I have ever wanted is to be told the plain truth and for justice to be done, and an apology. I am angry that I have been made to fight in the courts for over three years for things that could be so easy and simple.”
She said she learned that there was potentially troubling information relating to her after being contacted by Prince Harry. “In his email, Prince Harry said there was some information that had come to light and that it was something I would want to know about,” she said.
She said she then met the claimants’ lawyers at the Corinthia hotel in London, who told her the information had “accidentally surfaced” about her in 2021 “through a conversation between two private investigators who had worked for the Mail”.
One of the key parts of her case are a recording of a private investigator apparently admitting to “blagging” information from Lawrence by pretending to be a journalist from the Guardian.
ANL’s lawyers alleged that researchers working on behalf of the claimants had been trying to induce the private investigator, Christine Hart, to provide evidence “with the promise of a book deal”.
Antony White KC, the barrister leading ANL’s case, said the Mail ran a “sustained campaign” on Stephen Lawrence’s case, lasting 15 years. He said from the thousands of articles published, five articles are being complained about in the case by Lawrence, which were not complained about at the time of publication.
In written submission to the court, ANL’s lawyers said the “serious allegations, which are denied in their entirety, are unsupported by the available evidence”.
They said they were a product of an attempt by the claimants’ researchers and legal team to present a case against the publisher “based entirely on spurious and/or discredited information, none of which is before the court in the form of proper admissible evidence”.
“In fact, the reality is that the information in each of the articles was obtained by entirely legitimate reporting and based on the sources identified by Associated in its defence and evidence,” White submitted.
ANL and Stephen Wright, the author of the articles cited by Lawrence, have “rejected firmly” allegations of making payments to police officers.
The trial continues.
