LONDON: It was a classic tabloid scoop: a young woman's account of a two-year affair with the actor Ralph Fiennes, spiced up with racy details of what he liked to do and how he liked to do it.
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Three newspapers - The Sunday Mirror, The Mail on Sunday and News of the World - carried their versions of the tale on February 5, 2006.
The first two papers obtained the story through the normal tabloid route, paying the woman, Cornelia Crisan, £35,000 to tell all. But it appears that the News of the World took a sneakier approach. It illegally hacked into the voicemail messages of Ms Crisan's press agent, Nicola Phillips, and stole the story, according to allegations in a new lawsuit about to be brought by Ms Phillips against the newspaper and its parent company, News Group Newspapers, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News International.
Court papers have shed a stark and unflattering light on the newspaper's reliance on phone hacking as a standard reporting method. Until recently, News of the World maintained that the hacking had been limited to a single ''rogue reporter''.
But the paper's assertion was undermined last month when it dismissed Ian Edmondson, the paper's assistant editor for news, after he was apparently linked to phone hacking in court papers in a lawsuit brought by the actress Sienna Miller.
Late last month, Edmondson's former boss, Andy Coulson - News of the World's editor when hacking seems to have been at its height - resigned as communications director for the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, saying continued speculation about his possible role in the scandal was interfering with his job.
Mr Coulson continues to maintain he knew nothing about the phone hacking.
Ms Phillips's lawsuit is just one of many. At least a half-dozen more public figures have consulted lawyers and are said to be preparing suits.
News International has refused to comment.
In 2006, when Ms Phillips says her phone was hacked, she worked for the press agent Max Clifford. At the time, Mr Clifford was not doing business with the paper, which had angered him by writing unflattering articles about one of his clients.
So when Ms Crisan, a buxom Romanian singer, came forward to talk about how Fiennes had cheated on his girlfriend with her, Ms Phillips took the scoop to News of the World's competitors.
The suit alleges News of the World found out about Ms Phillips's negotiations by hacking into messages on her phone and the phones of her contacts.
News of the World tracked down Ms Crisan in time to publish an article on the same day as the other papers, under the headline ''Another Fiennes Mess''.
The New York Times
