The U.K. newspaper The Times, owned by News Corp, has been doing its best to keep its head down and lay low in the midst of the phone hacking scandal that has been plaguing the other company titles, but it seems the News Corp curse is inescapable. Or rather, it’s easily escaped, if you just don’t hack.
That’s the position of a former police blogger, anyway, who filed a lawsuit on April 11 against The Times for hacking into his email account in 2009. The Times admitted to the hacking in January, saying that the email allowed it to reveal the blogger as detective Richard Horton, who wrote anonymous, unauthorized accounts of police work.
The paper’s legal approach to this matter before the current lawsuit has been scattershot at best. News Corp originally claimed it had discovered Horton’s identity through legitimate means, then later confessed it had misled a judge and had known about the hacking all the while, this time claiming that revealing Horton’s identity was in the public interest. In his new lawsuit, Horton seeks “substantial” damages, Bloomberg reports.
