Actor Hugh Grant settles ‘Sun’ hacking claim for ‘huge sum’ as he says continuing case would have cost him £10m

Hugh Grant has settled his claim against News Group Newspapers, the publisher of The Sun, over allegations of unlawful information-gathering, admitting that he could not risk being saddled with an estimated £10m (€11.7m) in legal costs.

The actor, along with Prince Harry and more than 40 others, had sued NGN over alleged unlawful information-gathering and invasion of privacy. A trial is scheduled for January 2025.

Grant (63) claimed that he was targeted by journalists and private investigators working for The Sun, “including burglaries to order, the breaking and entering of private property in order to obtain private information through bugging, landline tapping, phone hacking”.

However, he said yesterday he had been forced to settle his claim because the rules of civil litigation meant that if he was awarded damages “even a penny less” than the settlement offer, he would be liable for the legal costs of both sides.

“As is common with entirely innocent people, they are offering me an enormous sum of money to keep this matter out of court,” he wrote in a lengthy explanation of his actions on X.

“I don’t want to accept this money or settle. I would love to see all the allegations that they deny tested in court… Rupert Murdoch’s lawyers are very expensive. So even if every allegation is proven in court, I would still be liable for something approaching £10m in costs. I’m afraid I am shying at that fence.”

The Love Actually star has been the public face of the Hacked Off campaign against the tabloid newspaper industry since it launched at the height of the phone-hacking scandal in 2011.

In 2012, he became director of a not-for-profit company set up by the campaign for press reform and also played a leading role at the Leveson Inquiry into press standards.

Grant had alleged that there was a break-in at his London flat, where the front door was forced off its hinges, and that a story appeared shortly afterwards in The Sun that “detailed the interior”.

He said he had been given information by a private investigator in early 2022 that prompted him to launch his claim.

But last May, the actor suffered a setback, when he was denied the chance to take his phone-hacking claims to trial.

Judge Timothy Fancourt ruled he could have brought that element of his claim sooner, having had knowledge of it.

In his statement, Grant claimed that Rupert Murdoch had spent over £1bn in damages to claimants and in lawyers’ fees, alleging that the media mogul appeared “remarkably determined that there shouldn’t be a trial of the facts”.

Despite accepting the settlement, he said the money “has a stink”, adding he refused to let it be “hush money”. As such, he said he would donate it to groups such as Hacked Off “to expose the worst excesses of our oligarch-owned press”.

By contrast, Prince Harry is not only pursuing his own claim but asked the judge in March if he could extend the parameters by incorporating allegations dating from 1994 until 2016, rather than the current 1996 until 2011.

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