Recently, a story broke in the music world that, I’m sure, had Rupert Murdoch wiping his brow with relief that he wasn’t the only one.
Heather Mills, ex-spouse of Sir Paul, recently claimed that a journalist from the Daily Mirror in the U.K. called her in 2001 about a voicemail message left to her by Paul. The voicemail had come right after the couple had a fight and allegedly contained Paul in full-on sad panda mode, begging Heather to come back home. He allegedly even sang a bar or three of “We Can Work it Out” into the phone to hammer his point home.
The story goes that this journalist asked Mills about the incident and then began quoting the voicemail in exact detail. When Mills accused him of hacking into their private matters and threatened police action, the journalist allegedly admitted to the hacking, and then promised not to use any of the voicemail or even a mention of it in the story he was preparing.
If that’s not enough to raise a "Yellow Submarine," it gets a lot more interesting.
The editor of the Daily Mirror at the time of the alleged incident was Piers Morgan, now host of his own CNN talk show. Morgan has issued a statement, which is as follows:
"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. The BBC has confirmed to me that this executive was not employed by the Daily Mirror. I have no knowledge of any conversation any executive from other newspapers at Trinity Mirror may or may not have had with Heather Mills. What I can say and have knowledge of is that Sir Paul McCartney asserted that Heather Mills illegally intercepted his telephones, and leaked confidential material to the media. This is well documented, and was stated in their divorce case. Further, in his judgment, The Honourable Mr. Justice Bennett wrote of Heather Mills: 'I am driven to the conclusion that much of her evidence, both written and oral, was not just inconsistent and inaccurate but also less than candid. Overall she was a less than impressive witness.'"
Article comments
1 - martin mcghee
Why does the author of this refer to Pauls wife as Linda , who obviously passed away
in 1998, very amatureish.
2 - Clare Sherman
If Paul left messages on Linda`s voicemail in 2001 that would certainly be a big story!
3 - JVH
Major journalistic faux pas referring to the wrong wife in the story. Linda, really?
4 - noel young
Is this writer really a journalist? Getting the wrong wife is the height of carelessness. He owes Piers Morgan an apology - just as MP Louise Mensch finally apologised after mistakingly accusing Morgan in Parliament
5 - NAP
"A seasoned music writer" who doesn't know the difference between Linda McCartney and Heather Mills.
Shameful.
6 - Michael Melchor
I made a pretty big error in referring to Heather Mills as Linda McCartney. I wasn't 100% sure how that happened, but I now chalk it up to familiarity. I know the name Linda McCartney, but I know much less of Heather Mills. Regardless, it was my error and I'll own it and apologize for it. So be it.
7 - Rider I
Communist China has declared war on the Allies and our leaders and agencies are to pathetic to respond.
[Rider, for our readers' convenience we'd rather you formatted sources as clickable links rather than raw URLs, especially when you inundate us with several dozen of them. We'd also rather you didn't copy and paste entire posts verbatim from your own blog. I've therefore taken the liberty of changing your comment to a single link to the blog post in question, which anyone who's interested can follow.
Dr Dreadful
Blogcritics Assistant Comments Editor]