In the midst of Prince Harry’s case against the publisher of the Daily Mirror for allegedly obtaining details of his personal life illegally, Sienna Miller is addressing her own traumatic, similar experience.
In 2005, the actress, then 23, was embroiled in another scandal when it was revealed that her then-boyfriend Jude Law cheated on her with his nanny. She then learned she was pregnant, and that news was subsequently leaked by the press.
After hacking her phone, British tabloid The Sun learned she was expecting and threatened to make the news public. (Sienna later chose to terminate the pregnancy.)
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In a new, timely, BBC documentary titled Scandalous: Phone Hacking on Trial, the actress dives into the difficult first weeks of her pregnancy, and the trauma that resulted from the hacking imbroglio.
Sienna’s publicist at the time, Ciara Parkes, recalled the moment she told her client that The Sun knew of her pregnancy, and said on the documentary: “She broke down. She screamed very loudly. It was a very guttural scream. I could hear her thumping to the floor.”
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The publication initially agreed not to publish the story, though a separate U.S publication did share the news, after which they did cover the news.
In the documentary, Sienna remembers the distrust she developed for the small group of family and friends who knew she was expecting. “I felt somebody must be selling stories,” she said.
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She added: “I sat down the five people in our lives who knew, and interrogated them violently. I was under such intense pressure. And said, it has to be one of you, so who is it?” as she revealed that there were “lots of tears and denials” in the process.
Sienna explained that as a result, memories of her pregnancy became a haze, and she admitted: “I don’t think I remember six weeks of my life. I actually don’t remember.”
She confessed: “I think I was in such a deep state of trauma by that point that I totally blacked out.”
In 2011, Sienna was awarded £100,000 from an outlet with the same parent company for The Sun, after the newspaper admitted to hacking into her phone.
Ten years later in 2021, she settled another phone hacking claim with the parent company, though the publisher gave no admission of liability, and instead the star received a financial settlement.
The BBC reports in their documentary that the pregnancy article in question remains today the “subject of ongoing litigation.”