The transcripts of the official inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press. More…
No, thank you all very much.
I do.
I understand.
Just that I found this incredibly difficult today, but I'd like to, I suppose, refer you to section -- point 17 of my statement. I'd really just like to make this very, very clear, that I've found it very, very difficult today not to name names, but the ...
No, he wasn't. He was clean, out of journalism, working in the fresh air. He was actually -- he was -- the old Sean was coming back. It really was. You know, he was very on top of his game.
I think Sean, in his way, thought that within the entertainment world, that to allow Sean to do some of the jobs and gain some of the interviews and gain the friendships of certain individuals, Sean thought that he had to be like them. I honestly do. I hate it ...
Yes, I think as far as drugs -- let's deal with that first -- Sean hadn't taken drugs for a long, long time. I think of Sean's drug-taking -- what I know, Sean may have taken drugs. I'm sure he did. Sean regarded that as part of the scene ...
(Nods head)
He'd probably been away from drink and drugs -- probably at that time I would have thought probably seven or eight months, at that time. I referred in my statement to the inquest that myself and my wife attended just lately, and it was so encouraging, for a change, to ...
No.
Yes.
Again, I think that's a very, you know, obvious route to go down. Yes, he was upset. Would he exaggerate? I don't think, looking at Sean's life and what he went through, the time when he was sober, the time to reflect -- no. No, I don't ...
I think sitting here today demonstrates that everything that Sean said, every statement that Sean made, was the truth. I sit here with a lot of pride.
I am fully aware of the interview. He was questioned by police and, yes, he chose, under legal advice, to answer the questions with "no comment".
Thank you for asking that question because I want to make this very, very clear. Sean received no money for what he did. In fact we talked about that many, many times and he felt very, very strongly. He received no money as far as articles that he provided to ...
That was Joe Becker of the New York Times.
Sean didn't contact newspapers. Sean actually tried to put his concerns into the public domain, but no one really wanted to much listen. Everyone -- everyone's perception of Sean was he's some drug-taking, drinking old journalist that's washed up, you know, and quite frankly no one wanted ...
I suppose -- going back to a comment earlier, I suppose 2010, we'd got him out of journalism, we'd got him working with horses. He'd stopped drinking. He was clean. The old Sean that we knew and loved as a family was returning to us, and I think ...
That's what he explained to me.
I can explain the way that he explained it to me, that it's quite a simple method of actually being able to track people via their mobile phone. Like a GPS system, I suppose, we would see something like -- I don't know, Googlemaps, whereby if they had someone ...
I think -- I'd like to think that my statement really tries to get across the feeling of myself as to what went on and why he did it. I'm just -- to this day, I'm disgusted with what went on. I feel sorry for the normal journalist that ...
That's correct. That's the first time that we ever spoke about this, whilst he was employment with the News of the World.
No, we'd spoken about it, but I had not really taken a lot of -- or paid a lot of attention to it. It was when he brought it up and we were discussing -- I actually remember walking around a field with him. We'd taken the dogs for a ...
The simple answer to your question is yes. What did he say about it? Again, I think when we discussed this -- and we discussed this probably a couple months before his death --
Do you know what? That's a very difficult question for me to answer, because I kind of like to think Sean actually didn't realise at the time that he was probably doing wrong. I think that he got carried away, like a lot of journalists, and was certainly ...
It's something we didn't really discuss. Sean always referred to the news desk as where he was filing or reporting and that's, I think, where his colleagues were.
It was very, very foreign for me. We came from -- I come from a very disciplined world, and to listen to Sean's stories of what went on -- it just didn't even seem like work to me. I mean, it seems, you know, as though no one was in ...
I think it was -- you know, again, I can only speak for what he told me.
I think the answer is the same for both papers, that the use of hacking was used widely.
No. Again, I mean, you know, just to make this clear as well, there was a kind of -- as far as the phone hacking was concerned and the other methods that they used to track people down, there was very much a structure in place that the journalists went through ...
Sorry, apologies, yes.
No, I must be on the wrong page. I do apologise.
Got it. Yes, I'm here.
Right, okay, sorry.
Page 3 of 3?
Um ...
These were practices that he witnessed.
It was. It was probably more daily at the News of the World.
It was a routine at the Sun.
That's correct.
They're emails that Sean sent after he'd finished working at the News of the World and the Sun. I think I just want to make a point here as well, and I take on board what you're saying about the names, et cetera, but I want to ...
The discussions took place whilst he was still employed at the News of the World and after he'd finished working at the News of the World.
No, it wasn't. These were all very short-term contracts, two, three, four months. Although I haven't put it in my statement -- and I know I shouldn't really go off the statement here, but at some point he actually got so fed up with journalism and what was ...
Probably what I would deem as working, no, not really. I mean, he went on initially to work subbing himself out to various papers, but not really what we would call -- I know journalism isn't a 9 to 5 job, but a normal kind of working environment, no. He ...
He felt that his world had fallen apart. He really did. I was speaking to his wife this weekend, actually, and we were just running over things and I was explaining to her my nervousness of appearing here today and she was saying that she can remember to this day ...
