14 DAY TRIAL // Rupert Murdoch, head of News International, who decided to shut down the News of the World tabloid in the eve of the phone hacking scandal, has been attacked with a foam pie while being questioned in Parliament on said scandal.
Video of the incident is below.
Comedian Jonathan May-Bowles (aka Jonnie Marbles) headed towards Murdoch and attempted to shove a plastic plate with a shaving foam pie in his face, as response for the allegations made against him, against Murdoch.
As the video will show, he did not get close enough to do that, because he was blocked by Wendi Deng, Murdoch’s wife, who delivered a slap in the face so powerful that it stopped the assailant.
Because of how promptly she reacted and the strength of her blow, Wendi is deemed a sort of hero that saves the day in the British press.
May-Bowles, on the other hand, was arrested and the hearing continued undisturbed. He remains in custody of the British police and may face charges for his gesture of protest.
However, his gesture did not come as a surprise, at least for his Twitter followers, whom he warned he was about to do something drastic at the hearing only minutes before the pie incident.
“Rupert Murdoch appears to be going senile #hackgate,” he wrote on Twitter from inside Parliament, where the hearing was taking place.
“It is a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before #splat,” he added, presumably as he was about to launch his attack on Murdoch.
As we also noted a short while ago, Murdoch shut down News of the World after it emerged that editors hacked countless phones to get leads for their stories.
Politicians, celebrities and even families of dead soldiers were targeted in a scheme that runs very deep, as new findings indicate.
Editors for News of the World even hacked into a kidnapped girl’s phone, deleting messages to make room for more and thus leading her parents to assume she was ok – she was, in fact, dead.
Murdoch says he’s not personally responsible for any of this.