EastEnders star Steve McFadden has revealed that distrust caused by phone hacking ruined his four-year relationship with former co-star Lucy Benjamin.
The actor, better known as Phil Mitchell, told the High Court on Tuesday that he was close to proposing to Lucy, who played Lisa Fowler, but decided against it because he suspected she was leaking private information to the media.
According to reports he explained: “All the articles in The Mirror’s newspapers that were constantly being published about us made me suspect Lucy.
“I thought she was shouting her mouth off. Now of course I know it was nothing like this and it was The Mirror’s journalists stealing information from our phones.”
Steve and Lucy dated for four years.
As well as their relationship, the stories also affected Lucy’s professional life. Steve continued: “Apart from our relationship, The Mirror articles also had a really profound effect on Lucy’s career and how she felt as a person.”
Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) has admitted to publishing 17 articles about Lucy, between 2000 and 2006, as a result of phone hacking.
Shane Richie also spoke at the hearing, which will establish damages against the media group for eight people, revealing that he and Jessie Wallace didn’t speak for five years due to the information that was being published.
The 51-year-old said that they used to leave voicemail messages for each other but then stopped because they didn’t trust each other.
Shane and Jessie as Alfie and Kat Moon.
He told the court: “You end up just not talking to each other because you end up not trusting each other
“After a while, me and Jessie didn’t speak for five years because she didn’t trust me and I didn’t trust her because we both thought we were selling each other down the river with stories, which it turned out of course wasn’t true.”
MGN has also accepted that 12 stories published about Shane, between 2003 and 2005, were acquired via phone hacking.
