Mills denies giving access to voicemails

February 10, 2012

Heather Mills, the former wife of Sir Paul McCartney, never authorised former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan, or anybody else, to listen to her voicemails, she has told Britain’s inquiry into press standards.

CNN talk show host Morgan has previously told the inquiry he listened to a voicemail message left to Mills by McCartney, but refused to say when or where he heard it because he wanted to protect a "source".

Mills said she had never authorised Morgan, or anybody, to access or listen to her voicemails, and neither had she ever played a recording to the former editor.

"I couldn’t quite believe that he would even try to insinuate, a man that has written nothing but awful things about me for years, would relish in telling the court if I had played a voicemail message to him," she said.

Mills told the inquiry that in early 2001 she and McCartney had argued about a trip she was planning to Gujurat, and while she stayed with a friend he left a series of messages on her voicemail.

"In the morning, when I woke up, there were many messages, but they were all saved messages, which I did not quite understand, because normally they wouldn’t be but I didn’t think too much of it.

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"I thought I must have pressed a wrong button.

"There were about 25 messages all asking for forgiveness of what had happened.

"One of them said, 'please forgive me’ and sang a little ditty of one of his songs on the voicemail.

"So that afternoon I went back and all was forgiven."

She told the hearing she had never recorded the messages and deleted them straight away.

But she said she was then called by a former Trinity Mirror employee - who the inquiry heard was not a Daily Mirror journalist, nor anybody working under the supervision of Morgan - saying they had heard a recording of the message.

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"I said, 'there’s no way that you could know that unless you have been listening to my messages'," she told the inquiry.

"And he laughed."

She said she threatened to take action if the story was published, and it wasn’t.

But in 2006, in a piece in the Daily Mail, Morgan referred to having listened to the message.

Giving evidence in December, Morgan told the inquiry he would not disclose a source who played him a tape of a message that McCartney left Mills.

He said: "I am not going to discuss where I heard it or who played it to me.

"I don’t think it's right. In fact the inquiry has already stated to me you don’t expect me to identify sources."

Lord Justice Leveson told him the only person who would be able to lawfully listen to the message was Mills or somebody authorised on her behalf.

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