Grant's suspicions over burglary

Bob and Sally Dowler arrive to give evidence to the Leveson Inquiry at the Royal Courts of Justice
12 April 2012

Hugh Grant has suggested that a newspaper may have broken into his flat after he was caught with a prostitute in Hollywood.

The About a Boy star said he had "no quarrel" with the media for the coverage of his arrest for a "lewd act" on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles in 1995.

But he told the Leveson Inquiry into press standards that he had suspicions about an expert burglary at his fourth-floor flat in London shortly afterwards in which nothing was stolen.

Grant, who was in a relationship with Liz Hurley at the time, recalled: "The day after that a detailed account of what the interior of my flat looked like appeared in one of the British tabloid papers."

The actor told the hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice in London he was happy to discuss his arrest by the Los Angeles Police Department over his encounter with prostitute Divine Brown.

Grant said: "I think it's an important point that I make in this statement that all the questioning and campaigning I've done recently about what I see as the abuses of some sections of the British press is emphatically not motivated by the treatment I got when I was arrested in 1995.

"I say in my statement I was arrested, it was on public record. I totally expected there to be tons of press, the press storm that happened. I have no quarrel with it, no quarrel whatsoever."

Earlier, the inquiry heard from Milly Dowler's mother who said she did not sleep for three nights after she learned that a private detective working for the News of the World hacked her daughter's phone.

Sally Dowler described her joy when she was given false hope that Milly was still alive after investigator Glenn Mulcaire deleted some of the murdered schoolgirl's voicemails.

She told the inquiry: "I rang her phone. It clicked through onto her voicemail, so I heard her voice and it was just like, 'she's picked up her voicemail, she's alive'. When we were told about the hacking, that's the first thing I thought.

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