“I Was In A Deep State Of Trauma”: Sienna Miller Opens Up About The Phone Hacking Scandal In An Explosive New Documentary
BY RADHIKA SETHOver the course of her more-than-two-decade-long career, Sienna Miller has endured an unimaginable amount of press intrusion and public scrutiny. “As a young woman I was so trivialised,” she told British Vogue in her December 2022 cover interview. “What people thought of me was so loud that I believed it.” In the candid conversation, she also opened up about taking part in an investigative documentary about the phone hacking scandal, of which she was an alleged victim. “ I got interviewed intimately for three hours and shown articles and, you know, I cried, which I just would never want to do,” she said of the experience, adding that her reaction at the time to that apparent violation of privacy was, “A couple of years of absolutely chaotic behaviour… I was, I suppose, in the midst of an absolute breakdown on every single level. Life was so out of control. It’s a miracle that I actually retained a career and a life.”
Now, that documentary is finally hitting the small screen: Scandalous: Phone Hacking on Trial, a 90-minute-long deep-dive into the prolonged legal battle which has taken place over allegations of unlawful information gathering at some of Britain’s biggest newspaper groups, which will air on BBC Two. It’ll mark the first time the actor has spoken about this painful period of her life on camera, providing more insight into the media frenzy she was subjected to when the news of her then-fiancé Jude Law’s affair broke in 2005. “I don’t think I remember six weeks of my life,” Miller says in the documentary. “I think I was in such a deep state of trauma by that point that I totally blacked out.”
As paparazzi began gathering at the locations where she’d arranged to meet her then-partner, Miller says she started to “suspect and distance” herself from those closest to her, even “[planting] stories or [telling] them information that wasn’t true to see if it came out”. She reveals that she also started borrowing people’s phones to make sensitive calls “because we did really start to believe something was deeply wrong”. Two days after the story of the affair was published, Miller discovered she was pregnant. “I had no opportunity to disappear or hide. It was just awful. It was so ****ing painful. And having to not respond, you know, it was, I can’t even remember anything other than, I just… I had a job to do, and I had several decisions to make, and I was really frightened.”
Miller’s publicist at the time, Ciara Parkes, also appears in the documentary, telling the BBC that she then received a phone call from Rebekah Brooks, then the editor of The Sun, telling her that she knew Miller was pregnant. Brooks didn’t, however, explain how she’d gotten that information, as only very close friends of Miller knew about the pregnancy. Parkes told Brooks about the “turmoil” Miller was going through, and Brooks agreed to not publish the story, but Miller says that this wasn’t a source of comfort – she was simply “horrified” that Brooks had the information at all. “I felt somebody must be selling stories,” Miller adds. “And I sat down the five people in our lives who knew, and interrogated them violently. I was under such intense pressure. And said, ‘It has to be one of you, so who is it?’ And lots of tears and denials.”
The story about Miller’s pregnancy first appeared in an American publication, before it was published by The Sun. “I had to tell Sienna that it had come out,” Parkes recalls. “She broke down. She screamed very loudly. It was a very guttural scream. And I know that she had just, I could hear her thumping to the floor. The decisions that she had to make were horrendous. No one should be in that position. But then to have to make them publicly, because it was completely obvious as to whether she would or wouldn’t be having a child was just an appalling situation to be in.”
News Group Newspapers responded to the BBC, saying that Miller’s account is “not borne out of evidence”, adding that “any suggestion of Rebekah Brooks being aware of or sanctioning any unlawful information gathering is not accepted. Any suggestion that Ms Miller’s pregnancy was leaked by The Sun is absurd.” It reiterated that it had settled Miller’s claim without admission of liability in relation to The Sun, and that “allegations of unlawful information gathering in relation to the article that revealed that Ms Miller was pregnant are the subject of ongoing litigation brought by those associated with Ms Miller [meaning it is] therefore limited in any response [it can] give”.
Alongside Miller, the documentary features similarly raw interviews with a range of other alleged phone hacking victims, from Hugh Grant and Heather Mills to Steve Coogan and Simon Hughes, as well as the families of murder victims. Given the explosive nature of their testimony and the scrupulous level of detail with which the saga is dissected, it’s sure to be essential viewing.
vogue.co.uk
