Rebekah Brooks arrived on Tuesday at a London police station, where she was charged with attempting to conceal evidence.
By JOHN F. BURNS and ALAN COWELL
LONDON — Rebekah Brooks, the former head of Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper empire and a close friend of Prime Minister David Cameron, was formally charged on Tuesday, along with her husband and four others, of perverting the course of justice in the hacking scandal that has burrowed deeply into British public life.
It was the first time that charges had been laid since the police reopened inquiries into the long-running scandal 16 months ago. The accusations are an important watershed in a wider criminal investigation that has resulted in about 50 people being arrested and released on bail by Scotland Yard teams that are delving into phone hacking, payments to public officials and other accusations of wrongdoing at two tabloid newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Those investigations seem sure to produce their own raft of criminal charges in the coming months, and could result in Ms. Brooks’s being indicted again, since she was arrested twice by the Scotland Yard investigators, once last year on suspicion of phone hacking and corruption, then again in March in the perversion of justice case. Legal experts said that the charges laid on Tuesday would almost certainly lead to a high-profile trial, in nine months or so, before High Court judges at the Old Bailey, Britain’s most famous criminal court.
The charges relate to a two-week period of high drama last summer when the full extent of the scandal was emerging: when phone hacking at The News of the World was revealed as having included a 13-year-old London schoolgirl, Milly Dowler, whose messages had been intercepted after she had been abducted and before her body was discovered, prompting Mr. Murdoch and his son James to fly to London and close down the 168-year-old tabloid. Ms. Brooks, a former editor of the paper, quickly resigned as chief executive of News International, the Murdoch newspaper subsidiary in Britain. She was arrested the first time shortly afterward.
The two Murdochs then went before Parliament to testify about the affair, denying any coverup by News International or News Corporation, the New York-based media conglomerate owned by the Murdoch family. But the scandal, revealing the widespread contacts and influence that the Murdochs and their top aides had at the heart of government, had developed a strong political taint, and Rupert Murdoch bowed to the mounting scrutiny by withdrawing a $12 billion takeover bid — which would have been Britain’s biggest media deal — for British Sky Broadcasting, or bskyb, the country’s most lucrative private television network.
According to the charges made public by the Crown Prosecution Service on Tuesday, it was in the midst of those events — between July 6 and July 19, 2011 — that Ms. Brooks, her husband and the four others, including her private assistant at News International, her chauffeur and a bodyguard, were engaged in concealing documents, computers, electronic devices and archive material from Scotland Yard investigators.
Ms. Brooks and her husband went to separate police stations in London on Tuesday to be formally charged. A statement from the Metropolitan Police said she had been charged with three counts of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and he had been charged with two counts, and a police statement said the couple would appear in court on June 13. A spokeswoman said the prosecution service had not decided whether it would seek to keep the couple in custody awaiting trial, though legal experts said bail would almost certainly be granted.
The decision to prosecute Ms. Brooks and her husband was seen as a blow to Rupert and James Murdoch, who put Ms. Brooks on the fast track to one of the most powerful positions in News Corporation’s worldwide empire, and who have stood by her as the scandal has grown. It was a blow, too, to Mr. Cameron. By his own account and Ms. Brooks’, he has maintained a cozy social relationship with her and her husband, Charlie Brooks, a prominent racehorse trainer, both when he was in the opposition and, since 2010, as prime minister.
But the charges drew a combative response from the Brookses couple even before prosecutors announced the details. In what one BBC commentator described as a move worthy of the tabloids to scoop the opposition, the couple issued a highly combative statement before the criminal charges had been formally announced. They left little doubt that their defense would rest, among other things, on claims that they are high-profile scapegoats and that a trial is an attempt to deflect some of the pressure that politicians and the police have come under as the scandal has mushroomed.
“We have this morning been informed by the Office of the Department of Public Prosecutions that we are to be charged with perverting the course of justice,” the couple said in a statement issued minutes before the Crown Prosecution Service announced that it would bring charges.
“We deplore this weak and unjust decision,” they added. “After the further unprecedented posturing of the C.P.S., we will respond later today after our return from the police station.
Later, before a bank of cameras under rainy skies outside of her lawyer’s office in London, Ms. Brooks and her husband made a characteristically defiant statement decrying the prosecution, denying wrongdoing and questioning whether the decision to charge them had been motivated by public pressure.
Mr. Brooks said that he felt he and the others arrested with his wife were being used “to ratchet up the pressure” on Ms. Brooks, who he said was “the victim of a witch hunt.” She could not, he said, expect a fair trial.
Ms. Brooks said she was “baffled by the decision to charge me today,” and questioned whether it was “made on a proper, impartial assessment of the evidence.” She described the charges as an “expensive sideshow, a waste of public money,” and said she was angry that those around her — her husband and former colleagues — had been “dragged into this.”
The prosecution service said it had received a file of evidence from the police on March 27 concerning Ms. Brooks, her husband and five other suspects. The prosecutors’ statement was read by Alison Levitt, the principal legal adviser to the director of public prosecutions, She identified the other suspects a Cheryl Carter, Ms. Brooks’ personal assistant; Mark Hanna, the head of security at News International; a chauffeur, Paul Edwards; and two security consultants, Daryl Jorsling and a second suspect who was not named.
Citing the two tests required for a prosecution, Ms. Levitt said that there was “sufficient evidence for there to be a realistic prospect of conviction” of all of them, with the exception of the unidentified security consultant, and that “a prosecution is required in the public interest in relation to each of the other six.” No further action would be taken against the seventh, unidentified suspect.
Ms. Levitt said all six suspects conspired to “conceal material” from police officers and to “remove seven boxes of material from the archive of News International.” Ms. Brooks, Mr. Brooks, Mr. Hanna, Mr. Edwards and Mr. Jorsling also conspired “to conceal documents, computers and other electronic equipment” from Scotland Yard officers that bore on the continuing police investigations into phone hacking and corruption of public officials by The News of the World and The Sun.
Prosecutors said evidence linked to five other unidentified people suspected of perverting the course of justice was under review. While the maximum legal penalty for the offense is life in prison, legal experts said Ms. Brooks and the others accused, if found guilty, could receive jail terms of several months, or as much as four or five years if convicted. They pointed to a case with some similarities involving Jeffrey Archer, the novelist, who received a four-year sentence in 2001 on his conviction for perjury and perversion of the course of justice in a libel trial involving a News of the World exposé that accused Mr. Archer of having sex with a London prostitute and later paying her 2,000 pounds — about $3,200 under current exchange rates — not to appear in court.
The police investigation leading to the charges on Tuesday is one of three separate but overlapping inquiries, including one by a parliamentary panel and a judicial inquiry under Lord Justice Brian Leveson, both of which have looked into the interlocking relationships of Britain’s news media, politicians and the police. But for the moment, the focus of the Scotland Yard inquiry has been less on the lawbreaking practices at the Murdoch newspapers that are the heart of the affair — activities that are expected to bring their own battery of criminal charges — than on any coverup.
Fleeting glimpses of what may emerge at the trials of Ms. Brooks and the others have emerged in newspaper coverage of the scandal. According to two former staff members at The News of the World who did not want to be named because they were discussing a topic that was the subject of an active police investigation, Ms. Carter, the former personal assistant to Ms. Brooks, was fiercely loyal to her boss.
An individual who was present on the day that Ms. Brooks cleared out her office at News International’s headquarters after her resignation was announced on July 15, and who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Ms. Brooks and Ms. Carter were seen carrying items to a parked car. Friends of Ms. Carter’s have said that she was subsequently required to surrender her passport to the police and cancel plans to emigrate to Australia. A lawyer for Ms. Carter said that she vigorously denied the charges.
It is unclear what Mr. Brooks, who has strong ties to Mr. Cameron’s Conservative Party, is suspected of having done. But The Guardian reported in July that he was involved in a peculiar episode featuring a laptop left in a bag in a garbage can in an underground parking garage near the London apartment he shares with his wife.
According to the newspaper, the bag, which also held some papers, was unearthed by security guards, who called the police. Mr. Brooks then tried to reclaim the items but could not prove they were his. A spokesman for Mr. Brooks told The Guardian that he had “left the bag with a friend who was returning it, but dropped it in the wrong part of the garage.” When asked how the bag had ended up in a garbage can, the spokesman replied, “The suggestion is that a cleaner thought it was rubbish and put it in the bin,” and added that it had been “nothing to do with Rebekah,” the newspaper said.
For Ms. Brooks, 43, the accusations punctuated what had been a stellar career.
At various times she had been the editor of Mr. Murdoch’s two market-leading British tabloids — The Sun and The News of the World — and went on to become chief executive of News International.
Ms. Brooks also built an extensive list of contacts, won access to the political elite and befriended successive prime ministers. The latest, Mr. Cameron, once signed text messages to her with the letters “LOL,” believing it to mean “lots of love,” she told a judicial inquiry only days ago.
Until July, the affair had seemed to simmer until disclosures that a private investigator working for The News of the World had hacked into the voice mail of Ms. Dowler, the teenager who was murdered in 2002. Public revulsion at the revelation led Scotland Yard to intensify its investigations, challenging what senior officers had previously accepted: News International’s assertions that hacking had been the work of a single “rogue reporter” who intercepted voice mail messages associated with the royal family in 2006.
Ms. Brooks testified last week before the Leveson inquiry into press ethics and behavior, offering a remarkable chronicle of the influence she wielded as a Murdoch editor and executive, running newspapers that at the time reached about 40 percent of Britain’s newspaper readers. She spoke of becoming, at the age of 31, the editor of The News of the World, at the time the country’s most widely circulated Sunday newspaper, and then of the top-selling daily tabloid, The Sun, from 2003 to 2009, before becoming chief executive of News International. She testified about her pride at influencing millions of voters, and of the frequency of the telephone calls she made to top cabinet ministers, pressing for policy changes that would reflect the tabloids’ exposés.
Tallying her contacts with Mr. Cameron, she said they had kept in touch by telephone, text messages and e-mail; met at lunches and dinners; and socialized at cocktail parties, birthday parties, summer outings, Christmas celebrations and, in one heady instance, on a yacht in Greece.
She even found herself, she said, correcting Mr. Cameron on his text message language. “Occasionally he would sign them LOL, ‘lots of love,’ ” Ms. Brooks told the Leveson inquiry, “until I told him it meant ‘laugh out loud.’ Then he didn’t use that anymore.”
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