Skip to Content

Paul McCartney’s ex-wife Heather Mills said on Thursday that an infamous voicemail of hers was obtained illegally by Piers Morgan, now a talk show host on CNN.

Before winning Celebrity Apprentice as a non-celebrity and moving on to the job with CNN, Morgan spent years as a tabloid newspaper editor in Great Britain.

Mills’ infamous voicemail of McCartney begging her for forgiveness was obtained illegally, she says. Morgan has boasted in the past of hearing the recording.

Paul McCartney Plays
(Getty Images)

Morgan has consistently denied he authorized the use of hacking in his tabloid days, but has not offered an explanation for how he came to hear the message.

The voicemail was left on Heather Mills’ mobile phone.

The accusation has dragged Morgan back into the phone hacking scandal that damaged Rupert Murdoch’s media empire and shut down The News of the World.

Giving evidence to an inquiry into British media ethics, Mills said she had left a house she shared with McCartney in early 2001 after they had had a fight.

She says she then turned her phone off, and the next morning, she had received 25 messages on her phone, all of which appeared to have been listened to.

 
Later that day, a reporter called her to say he had heard the couple had argued and that Paul McCartney had left a message in which he even sang to her.

This, she said, could only have come from her phone being hacked.

The reporter was from the Trinity Mirror Group though not from the Daily Mirror, one of the group’s papers, which Morgan edited from 1995-2004.

Asked if she had ever made a recording of Paul McCartney’s call or had played it to Piers Morgan herself, Heather Mills said succinctly: “Never.”

Mills, who married McCartney in 2002 and divorced six years later, said Morgan, “a man that has written nothing but awful things about me for years.”

The 44-year-old went on to say that Morgan would have relished telling the story ad nauseam if she had replayed a personal voicemail message to him.

Morgan, who bragged about hearing the message in a newspaper column in 2006, has refused to say who had played him the recorded message.

Morgan also edited the now defunct News of the World tabloid at the centre of the hacking scandal from 1994-1995, before the practice became rife.

He has boasted that he knew about phone-hacking well before the scandal broke, but subsequently said he was referring to rumors of such hacking.

Morgan has written in his diaries about a “little trick” for eavesdropping on voicemails that he heard of as early as 2001. He did not elaborate.