Phone-hacking led to son’s bullying, says Coronation Street star Shobna Gulati

Actress Shobna Gulati has told the High Court that phone-hacking led to her son being bullied at school.

Ms Gulati, who played Sunita Alahan in Coronation Street, became emotional as she gave her evidence at a hearing to decide the amount of compensation to be awarded in eight representative cases brought against Mirror Group Newspapers.

The others involve TV executive Alan Yentob, actress Sadie Frost, ex-footballer Paul Gascoigne, soap stars Lucy Taggart and Shane Richie, flight attendant Lauren Alcorn and TV producer Robert Ashworth.

She told Mr Justice Mann in London her phone started to be hacked from 2003, two years after she joined the soap opera, and at one point she wrote to the Press Complaints Commission after an article appeared in the Sunday Mirror about her “secret marriage”.

She said the “salacious gossip” about her past affected her son who was nine at the time and he was bullied “quite extensively” at school about who his father was. The article led to him having to leave when he was 14.

“I’m a single mum living on my own with my son. I believed it wasn’t in the public interest that the parentage of my child would be debated in a Sunday newspaper so I wrote this letter.

“I’ve always been very careful about answering questions about my son.”