McCartney: I’ll contact police over hack claim

LONDON— Former Beatle Paul McCartney said Thursday he would contact police over his ex-wife’s claim that their private communication had been spied upon by British tabloid journalists, condemning the practice as horrendous.

In comments to U.S. television journalists in Los Angeles delivered via videolink, McCartney said that he would be in touch with police as soon as he was finished with his summer tour.

“I will be talking to them about that,” McCartney said, speaking from Cincinatti, Ohio.

“I don’t think it’s great. I do think it is a horrendous violation of privacy, and I do think it’s been going on a long time, and I do think more people than we know knew about it. But I think I should just listen and hear what the facts are before I comment,” he said.

McCartney was dragged into Britain’s tabloid phone hacking scandal after his former wife, Heather Mills, alleged that messages he left on her cellphone had been broken into.

Mills’ allegation, made Wednesday in an interview with the BBC, centers on a phone call she said she received from a senior journalist with the Trinity Mirror group of newspapers in 2001, before she and McCartney married in 2002.

In the call, the journalist referred to relationship problems she was having with the former Beatle. When Mills asked how he knew, she said the journalist quoted a voicemail left by McCartney on her phone word-for-word. She said that when she then accused him of breaking into her phone and threatened to call the police, he admitted it and promised not to run a story on the couple’s fight.

Mills identified the journalist, although the BBC bleeped out the name, citing legal reasons.

Mills, a formel model, and McCartney divorced in 2008.