Mother tried suicide after tabloid story, claims singer

Singer Charlotte Church told a press ethics inquiry yesterday that her mother attempted suicide partly because Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World was going to run a story about her father’s affair. The former child star testified to the Leveson inquiry in London that she needed to hire bodyguards after another Murdoch-owned newspaper, the Sunday Times, misquoted her about the 9/11 attacks when she was only 15.A private investigator working for the now-defunct News of the World had also illegally hacked the mobile phone voicemails of her family, friends and old boyfriends, she said.Church added that she had sung at Murdoch’s wedding to Wendi Deng when she was 13 and was offered the choice of taking a £100,000 fee or sympathetic treatment by his papers. News International denies that claim.“A lot of this happened when I was just a minor and really young. It has had a psychological effect on me. I would hate to see that to happen to any other child who was in my position,” Church, who is now 25, told the inquiry.Church, who has also entertained Queen Elizabeth II, late pope John Paul II and US president Bill Clinton, said the News of the World published a story that Church’s father had an affair and had taken cocaine, while also reporting that her mother tried to commit suicide.She told the inquiry led by senior judge Brian Leveson that her mother’s suicide attempt was “at least in part” because she knew the affair story was coming.Church also hit out at an article in the Sunday Times which she said misquoted her about the bravery of firemen in the September 11, 2001 attacks and was later reprinted in Murdoch’s New York Post, causing outrage in the US. Earlier retired school teacher Chris Jefferies told the inquiry how he had been “shamelessly vilified” by tabloids after he became a suspect in the high-profile murder of landscape gardener Joanna Yeates. Jefferies, who was Yeates’s landlord, said he was effectively left under “house arrest” by papers that conducted a witch-hunt against him after he was arrested as part of an inquiry which gripped the country last Christmas. He was wrongly portrayed as a friend of a paedophile, questioned about his sexuality and in the aftermath of all the coverage he had changed his appearance, he told the inquiry.“They embarked on a frenzied campaign to blacken my character by publishing a series of very serious allegations about me which were completely untrue,” he said.Dutch engineer Vincent Tabak was jailed last month for the murder, and eight newspapers paid out substantial libel damages to Jefferies over their coverage while two of them, The Daily Mirror and the Sun, were also found guilty of contempt of court.The inquiry was ordered by Prime Minister David Cameron in July amid a public outcry over widespread phone-hacking at the now closed News of the World tabloid, part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation media empire.