14 DAY TRIAL // Heather Mills, the former wife of Paul McCartney, claims that a journalist working for the Mirror group newspapers hacked into her voicemail and asked her about the messages he heard.
Mills told the BBC Newsnight programme that back in 2001 she was called by a reporter from Trinity Mirror, the company that owns the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and People newspapers, who inquired about an argument her and McCartney had.
According to Mills, when the reporter started quoting messages that McCartney left on her voicemail she realized that her phone was hacked.
"You've obviously hacked my phone and if you do anything with this story... I'll go to the police," she allegedly told the journalist causing him to back down and respond: "OK, OK, yeah we did hear it on your voice messages, I won't run it."
Mills said the journalist who contacted her was a senior executive at a Trinity Mirror newspaper, but was not CNN TV host Piers Morgan, who was editor of the Daily Mirror at that time.
"Heather Mills has made unsubstantiated claims about a conversation she may or may not have had with a senior executive from a Trinity Mirror newspaper in 2001.
"I have no knowledge of any conversation any executive from other newspapers at Trinity Mirror may or may not have had with Heather Mills," Piers Morgan said in response to Mills' claims.
"To reiterate, I have never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, nor to my knowledge published any story obtained from the hacking of a phone," he added. That does not mean, however, that he didn't know of someone else having hacked a phone.
In an article titled "I'm sorry, Macca, for introducing you to this monster," that Daily Mail ran back in 2006 Morgan wrote that: "[...] At one stage I was played a tape of a message Paul had left for Heather on her mobile phone."