14 DAY TRIAL // On Wednesday, a former editor of the now-defunct publication News of the World (NOTW) admitted hacking into the phone of Kate Middleton 155 times.
The NOTW phone hacking trial continues. According to the Daily Mail, former royal reporter Clive Goodman took the stand on Wednesday and admitted illegally accessing the voicemails of the Middleton almost every day.
The hacks took place between December 2005 and August 2006, when Goodman was arrested. The former reporter also admitted intercepting the voicemails of Prince William, Prince Harry and royal aides.
Goodman was sentenced to prison for 4 months in 2007 for hacking the phones of royal aids, but no one has known the full extent of the spying operation until now. He allegedly didn’t tell anyone about hacking Middleton, now the Duchess of Cambridge, because no one asked him about it.
Interestingly, Andy Coulson, who at the time was the editor of NOTW, denies conspiring to hack into phones, and he denies paying public officials for the phone number of royals. However, Goodman told the court that Coulson knew about what he was doing and even approved weekly payments to him.
Rebekah Brooks, another former editor at NOTW, also denied sanctioning phone hacking. She told the court that when she was the editor at the tabloid, between 2000 and 2003, she didn’t know phone hacking was illegal, but claimed that she would have considered it a “serious breach of privacy” is she had known what was going on.