The Daily Beast has reviewed new claims submitted to a British court for review. The documents allege that Lewis oversaw the deletion of emails related to the hacking scandal.
The Washington Post publisher and CEO Will Lewis finds himself caught in a legal endgame centered on a scandal that seems never to go away, the industrial-scale hacking practiced in the newsrooms of Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids from the mid-1990s until it was exposed in 2011.
Lewis was never involved in the hacking. The legal action involves his alleged role in the frantic efforts of Murdoch and his top executives to purge all the records of the crime. He has so far refused to make any comment to counter the allegations.
But the pressure on him to respond is growing because the lawyers representing victims of the hacking have asked the presiding judge in London to admit into their lawsuit new witnesses’ testimonies gathered during the last year of discovery. The judge is expected to rule on this soon.
Clive Irving is senior consulting editor at Condé Nast Traveler, specializing in aviation; and the author of Wide-Body: The Triumph of the 747(Morrow)
This article was originally published on The Daily Beast and partially republished here, with permission.
