LONDON, Nov. 28 (UPI) -- Pop singer Charlotte Church blamed the tabloid at the center of Britain's phone-hacking scandal as partially responsible for her mother's attempted suicide.
Church told the inquiry into media ethics that her mother's suicide attempt was "at least in part" because she knew News of the World -- the now-defunct newspaper at the heart of the scandal that resulted in the arrest of several editorial leaders -- was publishing a story exposing her husband's affair, the BBC reported Monday.
The 25-year-old Welch entertainer said News of the World, which closed because of the scandal, had already printed a story concerning her mother's mental health "so they knew how vulnerable she was but still published the story" of her father's affair.
Church said the kid-glove treatment she received when she first gained fame at age 12 yielded to the "worst excess of the press" between the ages of 16 to 20, including revealing her pregnancy before she told her parents.
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She told the panel paparazzi had taken pictures up her skirt, photographers were camped outside her house and her manager found evidence of a camera hidden in shrubbery outside her home.
Also Monday, the lawyer for Christopher Jefferies, a former teacher wrongly arrested for a Bristol woman's death last December, said media "shamelessly vilified" him.
Jefferies' statement, read to the panel, told of a "frenzied campaign to blacken his character."
He said the tabloid press had decided he was guilty of the killing of landscape architect Joanna Yeates, 25. A Dutch engineer was convicted of the slaying last month.
"The national media shamelessly vilified me. The [British] press set about what can only be described as a witch hunt," the statement said. "It was clear that the tabloid press had decided that I was guilty of Miss Yeates' murder and seemed determined to persuade the public of my guilt."
