Baroness Doreen Lawrence arriving at the International Dispute Resolution Centre in November 2025. Picture: James Manning/PA Wire
Baroness Doreen Lawrence has accused the Daily Mail of “pretending to be my friend” and playing her “for a fool” by using private investigators to gain her private information.
Baroness Lawrence, the mother of Stephen who was murdered in a racist attack in 1993, had a good relationship with the Daily Mail for many years.
Four years after Stephen’s murder the Daily Mail famously published a “Murderers” front page accusing five men of killing him. “If we are wrong, let them sue us,” the paper wrote. Two of the men, Gary Dobson and David Norris, have since been convicted of the crime.
Baroness Lawrence later launched the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust which partnered with the Daily Mail for several years to run the Stephen Lawrence Scholarship for young journalists, with the aim of improving diversity in the industry.
However Baroness Lawrence is now among a group of seven claimants, including Prince Harry and Sir Elton John, suing Mail publisher Associated Newspapers over the alleged invasion of their privacy using unlawful information gathering techniques.
[See full trial coverage on Press Gazette here]
Baroness Lawrence entered the witness box at the trial being held at the High Court in London on Monday. She said it was “very painful” to be in court because she had built up trust with the Daily Mail and its journalist Stephen Wright.
She said: “Because there are very few people that I trust, very few people that I talk to.
“I thought we had a relatively good relationship with him and I have been played for such a long time.”
She said in her written witness statement that she “was working with The Mail and the journalist we trusted there, Stephen Wright, right up until the day I found out in 2022 that everything I believed to be true about Stephen Wright and The Mail was a lie”.
Baroness Lawrence’s claim relates to five articles, all bylined by Daily Mail crime journalist Stephen Wright (and one jointly with longtime chief reporter David Williams). She said she had believed Wright was “a close ally and even a friend”.
Wright is due to give evidence later in the trial. Associated Newspapers denies all the allegations against it.
The articles outlined in Baroness Lawrence’s claim date from 1997, 2000, 2004 and 2007.
In relation to one article, Baroness Lawrence said, private investigator Christine Hart has admitted she stole the campaigner’s information and “blagged” her private records.
Baroness Lawrence said: “She has admitted that she did this for Stephen Wright who never had my mobile telephone number,” adding that “all communications” with the journalist went through her lawyer Imran Khan KC “who trusted him as much as me”.
Baroness Lawrence said she had believed the other three articles were sourced from police leaks. “I never thought to blame Stephen Wright or the Daily Mail,” she said in her witness statement. “I never thought that they could be hacking and tapping and bugging me, or that they were in bed with the corruption that made sure Stephen’s killers were not found and put in jail.”
The articles related to police developments in the case against Stephen Lawrence’s killers. But Baroness Lawrence said: “It was important to keep developments like this out of the press to avoid jeopardising the investigation and the arrests of suspects, and to avoid any abuse of process argument when it came to any trial. I remember feeling angry about these unlawful articles and thinking the police only cared about themselves and how they looked, and not actually about Stephen and catching his killers.”
She added that she was not aware of and had not approved any payment made by Wright for the information in these articles.
Baroness Doreen Lawrence: Mail made me ‘a victim all over again’
Associated Newspapers has challenged whether Baroness Lawrence knew she could bring a potential claim more than six years ago, the cut-off point for litigation.
She said in her witness statement: “How could I have known that The Mail were landline tapping me, blagging me, and hacking into my voicemails, monitoring my bank account and phone bills, targeting me with hidden electronic surveillance, and making corrupt payments to serving police officers to steal information about the murder investigations into Stephen’s death whilst pretending to be my friend?
“How could anybody know, when they were being played for a fool?”
Baroness Lawrence said she received an email from Prince Harry in January 2022 informing her there was “some information that had come to light and that it was something I would want to know about”.
She said she met with lawyers Anjlee Sangani and David Sherborne who told her information that she had been targeted by the Mail had “accidentally surfaced… in 2021 through a conversation between two private investigators who had worked for The Mail”.
Baroness Lawrence said she was told: “I and the investigations into Stephen’s murder had been a specific target of a wide range of criminal activities aimed at secretly stealing and exploiting information from victims on the instruction of The Mail newspapers. I was told that one of the private investigators had been tasked to monitor my phone bills and bank accounts as well as my private communications for several years.
“The purpose of the tasking had been for ‘internal security’ conducted by the Daily Mail newspaper and a specific journalist there, and that the reason had been to check I was not receiving ‘buy up’ money from or working with other newspapers during the Justice for Stephen Lawrence Campaign, and also to check my political activities with left-wing groups.”
Baroness Lawrence said she and Khan were “utterly shocked” to learn the Mail “had been using private investigators to secretly steal information about me and the investigation into Stephen’s murder”.
“We had trusted The Mail and worked with The Mail for 25 years. I felt like I had been taken for a fool. I still do. I don’t trust them at all anymore after what they have done to me.”
Giving evidence, Baroness Lawrence questioned: “Were they really fighting for justice for my son or were they just pretending that they were to sell their papers?
“At the time it looked as if they were supporting us. But how many other black families have they supported?
“They’ve used me and my son to give them credibility for supporting a black family. But at the end of the day, I don’t think they have.”
Daily Mail ‘Murderers’ front page from 14 February, 1997.
Baroness Lawrence started her case against the Mail three months later, in March 2022.
She said in her witness statement: “I am a victim all over again, but by people who I thought were my allies and friends.”
She added that she was “angry” that the Mail “seem more interested in interrogating” her over how she found out about the new allegations “rather than saying sorry, investigating what it did, and getting at the truth of what happened and who knew about it and authorised such things”.
Baroness Lawrence described the case and the invasions of her privacy as “another trauma to me”.
“To discover that The Mail set private investigators and corrupt police officers on me to look into my phone calls and communications when I thought I was safe in my home, but that I was not safe and that the people who I thought were friends were in fact enemies, and that they were embedded with the police corruption that has caused so much harm and grief to me, has violated me and made me feel like a victim all over again.”
She added: “I hope that I find truth for Stephen and that The Mail never victimise or profit from someone’s grief and loss again. This is what I hope to achieve after the years of fighting in court that The Mail have put me through and an apology for what they have done to me.”
Mail publisher says Lawrence articles based on ‘entirely legitimate reporting’
- An Associated Newspapers spokesperson said in 2022,
- when Baroness Lawrence’s claim was first announced
- “The Daily Mail has campaigned tirelessly for 25 years to obtain justice for Stephen Lawrence and other victims of injustice. The paper is known throughout Fleet Street for its work exposing corruption and incompetence in the police.”
In written submissions, Antony White KC, representing the publisher, said the allegations in relation to Baroness Lawrence “are denied in their entirety” and “are unsupported by the available evidence”.
He added: “They are the product of an attempt by members of the claimants’ research team, adopted by Baroness Lawrence and her legal representatives, to present a case of unlawful information-gathering against Associated based entirely on spurious and/or discredited information, none of which is before the court in the form of proper admissible evidence.
“In fact, the reality is that the information in each of the articles was obtained by entirely legitimate reporting and based on the sources identified by Associated in its defence and evidence.”
He continued: “From the top down, Associated’s editors, desk heads and journalists, many of whom have worked at the company for many years and even decades, are lining up to reject the claimants’ allegations of habitual and widespread phone hacking, phone tapping and blagging within the organisation, whilst acknowledging where appropriate the use of TPIs (third party investigators) to obtain information prior to April 2007 when their use was largely banned.”
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