Church waived £100k Murdoch fee in exchange for good publicity

SINGER Charlotte Church waived a £100,000 (€116,000) fee to sing at Rupert Murdoch’s wedding when she was 13, in exchange for a promise of favourable publicity, she said.

Church, dubbed The Voice of an Angel, told the Leveson Inquiry she was asked to sing at Murdoch’s wedding to Wendi Deng in 1999.

In a statement, she said she was offered a fee of £100,000, but was told if she waived it she “would be looked upon favourably by Mr Murdoch’s papers”.

The inquiry heard News International denied the offer was made but Church said: “I remember being told that Rupert Murdoch had asked me to sing at his wedding to Wendi Deng and it would take place on his yacht in New York.

“And I also remember being 13 and thinking, ‘why on earth would anybody take a favour over £100,000?’.”

She was urged by her management and figures from the record company into taking the option of the favour from a “powerful man” like Murdoch.

Church later said she was “totally appalled’ by a clock on The Sun’s website counting down to her 16th birthday.

She said the clock was an “innuendo” highlighting the fact she was reaching the age of sexual consent.

“It was a little bizarre,” she said. “I was really uncomfortable with it in general.”

The hearing was told that her manager found evidence of a camera hidden in a shrub outside her home, she was chased by photographers in cars, paparazzi had taken pictures up her skirt and down her top and there were photographers outside her house on most days.

She told the hearing that The Sun published a story about her being pregnant for the first time before she had even told her family.

Only she, her then partner Gavin Henson and her doctor knew about the pregnancy. She said that the only way journalists could have found out about the pregnancy was through “hacked voicemail messages from the doctor or other surveillance”, although she did not have any evidence.

Church spoke of the “massive psychological effect’ of a News of the World story in December 2005 reporting that her father was having an affair and that her mother had attempted suicide.

The front-page article, headlined “Church’s three-in-a-bed cocaine shock”, was accompanied by a picture of the singer.

She said: “I see no public interest at all that it serves other than to sell papers.”

Church said she had been contacted earlier this year by the police who showed her details found in Glenn Mulcaire’s notebooks, including passwords, PIN codes and phone numbers, relating to her and others in her life.

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 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.

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.

Dutch engineer Vincent Tabak was jailed last month for the murder, and eight newspapers paid out 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.