LONDON — After a year of controversy over the widespread phone hacking by one of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid newspapers, British prosecutors filed criminal charges Tuesday against eight of the most prominent figures in the scandal, including Andy Coulson, who was Prime Minister David Cameron’s communications chief at No. 10 Downing St. until the scandal forced his resignation last year.
Also charged was Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of Murdoch’s newspaper empire in Britain until she, too, resigned last summer. Others who were indicted include five journalists who played prominent roles at News of the World, the tabloid where Brooks and later Coulson were the top editors at the time that the hacking is alleged to have occurred, from 2000-2006.
The criminal charges — and the possibility of prison terms if prosecutors win convictions — are a turning point in the affair, adding the drama of high-profile trials to a saga that has thrown politics, policing and journalism in Britain into a prolonged fit of self-examination and has shaken the foundations of the Murdoch empire.
The eighth person charged was Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator who served a prison term in 2007, together with the News of the World’s reporter specializing in coverage of Britain’s royal family, for hacking into the cell phones of younger members of the royal family and their aides. Those convictions remain the only ones so far in the hacking furor.
After Tuesday’s announcement by Alison Levitt, the senior legal adviser at the Crown Prosecution Service, headlines in Britain focused on Coulson and Brooks, both of whom have strong personal links to Cameron — Coulson through his years at Cameron’s side, in and out of government, and Brooks because of the friendship she and her husband, Charlie Brooks, had with Cameron before the scandal broke.
Political analysts said the fact that the two now face criminal trials that seem certain to run on at least through the next year, attracting wide news coverage, posed a hazard for the prime minister. With a general election set for 2015, the analysts said, Cameron and the Conservative Party are potentially vulnerable to any new revelations that emerge from the trials, in the form of hitherto unpublished e-mails or testimony touching on the prime minister’s dealings with Coulson or Rebekah Brooks.
The charges, the most significant so far in a scandal that has rocked British public life and shaken faith in the media, politics and police, relate to allegations that hundreds of celebrities, politicians and others named in news stories had their voice mails intercepted by News of the World in search of news scoops. They refer specifically to more than a dozen high-profile figures, including actors Jude Law, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie who prosecutors say were targeted between 2000 and 2006.
Other well-known figures listed by Levitt, the prosecutor, as having been targeted include Sir Paul McCartney and his former wife, Heather Mills; the actresses Sienna Miller and Sadie Frost; Wayne Rooney, perhaps Britain’s best-known professional soccer player; Sven-Goran Eriksson, a Swede who is England’s former soccer manager; four former Labor party Cabinet ministers — David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, Tessa Jowell and John Prescott — who held between them some of the most powerful posts in government in the years when the hacking is alleged to have occurred; and Lord Frederick Windsor, a great-nephew of Queen Elizabeth II.
Murdoch shut down the 168-year-old News of the World last year as a result of the burgeoning scandal. The criminal charges against former senior staff members of that publication have big implications for Murdoch, 81, and News Corp., his $53 billion global media giant.
Rebekah Brooks was Murdoch’s personal choice to head his British newspaper subsidiary, News International, and he made a priority of defending her last July, when he took an urgent flight to London to take over management of the crisis and to supervise the closure of News of the World, one of Britain’s most profitable newspapers.
That effort quickly collapsed amid anger over a police disclosure that one of the targets of the newspaper’s cell-phone hacking had been Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old schoolgirl who disappeared in 2002 and was subsequently found murdered.
The hacking occurred when she was the subject of a widespread police hunt but before her body had been discovered. The disclosure prompted Rebekah Brooks’ resignation and led Murdoch to apologize to Milly’s parents at a luxury London hotel and to offer a settlement that was reported at the time to run into several million dollars.
Five of the eight people now facing criminal charges are accused of involvement in the hacking of the schoolgirl’s phone. They are Rebekah Brooks, Coulson, Mulcaire and three journalists who worked in senior newsroom positions at News of the World: Stuart Kuttner, a former managing editor; Greg Miskiw, another senior editor; and Neville Thurlbeck, the paper’s longtime chief reporter.
Brooks, Coulson and Thurlbeck all promised Tuesday to fight the charges.
Brooks said she was “distressed and angry” and called the allegation that she conspired to spy on Milly “particularly upsetting.” Coulson insisted that he would never have done anything to harm the investigation into Milly’s disappearance.
Thurlbeck, meanwhile, said he would make it clear that he always acted “under the strict guidance and advice of News International’s lawyers and under the instructions of the newspaper’s editors.”
The other journalists charged with involvement in phone hacking, though not in Milly’s case, are Ian Edmondson and James Weatherup, who were also senior editors at the tabloid.
“I am not guilty of these charges,” Rebekah Brooks said in a statement, referring to her time as editor of News of the World. “I did not authorize, nor was I aware of, phone hacking under my editorship.”
Coulson did not respond to a call seeking comment, and a spokesman for News International also declined to comment.
A spokesman for the prime minister said he had no comment on the matter, beyond his public statements — he has stopped short of issuing an apology, but has told Parliament that he regrets hiring Coulson and that with hindsight he would not have done so.
Privately, according to people with knowledge of his thinking, Cameron and his office remain concerned about the matter. Speeches are vetted to omit references that might fuel jokes about it, and lawyers have been taking statements from staff members on their relationships with the Murdoch family and their senior executives.
Rebekah Brooks also faces three criminal counts of conspiring to obstruct justice, which were announced by prosecutors in May. She, her husband and four members of her staff at News International were accused of concealing documents, computers and other material from detectives investigating phone hacking about the time News of the World was closed. She also has strenuously denied those charges.
Tuesday’s charges carry a maximum jail sentence of two years. Rebekah Brooks joined News of the World when she was 20 and by her early 40s had risen to the top of its parent company as one of Murdoch’s closest lieutenants. She and her husband were neighbors of Cameron, and they have admitted to exchanging frequent text messages and riding horses together.
The eight defendants will appear in court on Aug. 16, prosecutors said. But the charges filed Tuesday are likely only the beginning. Three police investigations into the phone hacking, payments to public officials and data hacking continue, Scotland Yard has said.
Three of Scotland Yard’s top officers have resigned over their failure to get to the bottom of the scandal. So far, more than 50 current and former journalists, public officials and others have been arrested, and prosecutors have yet to decide whether they will be prosecuted. The country’s media regulator — widely discredited by the scandal — has been scrapped.
Over the weekend, a News Corp. spokesman confirmed that Murdoch resigned last week from directorships at a cluster of companies that have oversight over his British papers, which also include the tabloid Sun and two major broadsheets, The Times and The Sunday Times.
The spokesman described the move as no more than “a corporate housecleaning exercise” ahead of the company’s move to split its operations into two companies: one that will own the company’s newspaper and book publishing assets, including the British papers and The Wall Street Journal, and the other to operate the company’s far more profitable television and film assets, including the Fox broadcasting channels and the 20th Century Fox movie franchise.
But the resignations from the boards of the British newspaper companies fueled speculation, already rife among media analysts on both sides of the Atlantic, that Murdoch has decided that his lifelong passion for newspapering is outweighed by the financial and reputational costs of hanging on to the British papers, a steppingstone in building his global empire.
A powerful bloc of News Corp. investors has long favored selling the papers off, and the prospect of protracted criminal trials seems likely to intensify that pressure.
Murdoch also faces dozens of civil lawsuits from a pool of more than 2,000 people whom police have said might have been victims of phone hacking. And when all the court cases have been cleared, a process that could take years, a British public inquiry will begin sifting the evidence of wrongdoing in the Murdoch media empire once more.
If it is found that voicemail interceptions occurred on U.S. soil, as some have alleged, Murdoch’s profitable U.S. business interests could also suffer. A spokesman for the Crown Prosecution Service declined to comment on the matter, saying the defendants are accused of conspiracy, not of actual interceptions.
On Monday, Scotland Yard’s Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers said detectives are seeking evidence from two newspaper companies that are rivals of Murdoch’s and are looking into more than 100 claims of computer hacking, improper access to medical records and other misconduct stemming from the scandal.
Information for this article was contributed by John F. Burns and Ravi Somaiya of The New York Times; and by Raphael Satter of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/25/2012