Tables Turned On Britain's Out Of Control Press

LONDON — It is a story made to order for the sensation-hungry tabloid newspapers that have millions of avid readers in Britain: a roll call of A-list celebrities and crime victims pouring out — day by day, live on the Internet — the personal miseries they say they have endured in seeking to protect the everyday normality of their private lives.

But this time, for the tabloids, it is a story with a bitter twist. For what is happening in a courtroom at the Royal Courts of Justice has amounted to a turning of the tables, through the medium of a government-appointed inquiry into the “culture, ethics and practices” of British newspapers, that has turned into a legal soap opera in which the villains have emerged as the tabloids themselves.

The high court judge leading the inquiry, Sir Brian Leveson, has called the sessions that began this week, relayed live on the inquiry’s Web site, a “right of reply” for victims of tabloid excesses. He has refused requests by the newspapers’ lawyers for the right to cross-examine the witnesses, and issued a formal warning to the mass-circulation papers not to strike back against those testifying with new articles that invade their privacy or damage their reputations.

One of those taking advantage of the platform was Sienna Miller, 29, a New York-born actress who lives much of the year in London and found herself a target of intense tabloid scrutiny when she was dating the actor Jude Law. One of the inquiry’s most arresting moments came on Thursday when she described her experiences with London’s “relentless” paparazzi, and described being spat at, verbally abused and subjected to dangerous car chases while trying to elude them.

“I felt like I was living in some sort of video game,” Ms. Miller said. “For a number of years, I was relentlessly pursued by 10 to 15 men, almost daily.”

“I would often find myself — I was 21 — at midnight running down a dark street, alone, with 10 big men chasing me, and the fact that they had cameras in their hands meant that was legal,” she added. “But if you take away the cameras, what have you got? You’ve got a pack of men chasing a woman, and obviously that’s very intimidating.”

The stories tumbling from the witness stand have been dismal enough to cause at least a minor shock wave in a country that had adjusted over the years with a collective shrug of resignation — mixed, for many readers, with a guilty pleasure — over tabloid newspapering and its relentless pursuit of scoops. Now it is commonplace, at the hearings and beyond, to describe the tabloids as a mafia, and to demand steps to bring them back within the scope of the law.

Beyond the wolf-pack excesses of paparazzi, beyond the phone hacking that has been news here for months, witnesses have told of practices that they described as bullying and intimidation, and of what one witness, Max Mosley, the former head of Formula One racing, referred to as “blackmail.” The film star Hugh Grant said that successive British governments had been intimidated into allowing the excesses to go uncurbed for decades.

The tales have been similar, whether they came from Ms. Miller and Mr. Grant, from J. K. Rowling, the author of the “Harry Potter” series, or Mr. Mosley. Perhaps more shocking have been the accounts of victims of crimes like Bob and Sally Dowler, the parents of a murdered 13-year-old girl whose cellphone was hacked into by a private investigator working for the now defunct tabloid The News of the World, and Gerry and Kate McCann, whose 3-year-old daughter, Madeleine, was abducted, and never seen again, while they were on vacation in Portugal’s Algarve region in 2007.

The accusations are the culmination of the phone hacking scandal that has enveloped Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire through the wrongdoing of The News of the World, which had been Britain’s best-selling Sunday paper. The Murdochs shut down the paper in July amid disclosures about its use of phone hacking and other potentially criminal techniques, including allegations of bribing police officers, to invade the personal lives of nearly 6,000 people.

At the inquiry’s hearings, the scandal has broadened to include all of what are known in Britain as the “red tops,” mass-circulation tabloids known for lurid headlines. A common theme of the witnesses has been the menacing tactics they say tabloid reporters have used. Mr. Grant said his London apartment was broken into after he was arrested with a prostitute in Los Angeles in 1995. Ms. Rowling said a tabloid reporter somehow placed a note seeking information for an article in her 5-year-old daughter’s schoolbag; she said years of stakeouts outside her homes, car chases and intimate revelations about her private life had left her feeling violated and paranoid.

“The attitude seems to be absolutely cavalier,” she said. “You’re famous, you’re asking for it.”

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