Rebekah Brooks

She joined NOTW as a secretary and moved up to feature writer and eventually editor

Former News of the World (NOTW)  editor Rebekah Brooks has been re-arrested. She was at the paper’s helm when it hacked phones on an industrial scale. The former CEO of the  Rupert Murdoch-owned News International also has other non-dubious achievements—she was the youngest editor of a British national newspaper with NOTW and also the first female editor of The Sun.

Rebekah is described as hugely ambitious by her former editors. She joined NOTW as a secretary and moved up to feature writer and eventually editor. Her tasks at the newspaper consisted of things like preparing for an interview with James Hewitt, Princess Diana’s lover, by reserving a hotel suite and hiring a team to ‘kit it out with secret tape devices in various flowerpots and cupboards’, Piers Morgan, her former boss, has written in his memoirs.

Later, it was revealed that NOTW often intercepted mobile phone messages of celebrities, politicians and other public figures. Two reporters were jailed for intercepting such messages of the royal family, and it was also alleged that under Brooks’ guidance, the paper had hacked the voicemail of a missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler (later found to be murdered), to access messages left by her parents. Brooks eventually resigned and said that she was sorry for the people who were hurt. NOTW was also shut down and people alleged that their jobs had been sacrificed to save Brooks. The Daily Telegraph reported that even after her resignation, Brooks was on News Corp’s payroll and was asked by Murdoch to travel the world on his expense.

She was first arrested on 17 July 2011, on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications and on suspicion of stoking corrupt practices. Last week, she was re-arrested, with her husband, on suspicion of a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

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