Rebekah Brooks

In September 2015, Brooks was confirmed as CEO of News UK, the renamed News International, re-establishing the working relationship with News Corp founder and chairman Rupert Murdoch.

In September 2015 Brooks was reappointed as CEO of News UK, the renamed News International.

In September 2015, Brooks was reappointed as CEO of the company, now named News UK.

While at the News of the World, Brooks oversaw its campaign of "naming and shaming" individuals suspected to be convicted child sex offenders—a campaign launched in the wake of the murder of Sarah Payne while hacking her mother's voicemail. The paper's decision led to angry mobs terrorising those they suspected of being child sex offenders, which included several cases of mistaken identity and one instance where a paediatrician had her house vandalised, apparently by people who thought her occupation meant she was a paedophile.

On 24 June 2014, Rebekah Brooks was cleared of all charges related to the phone hacking.

Brooks was born Rebekah Mary Wade in Warrington, Lancashire. Brooks grew up in Daresbury, to the south of Warrington, and when she was 14 decided she wanted to be a journalist. She attended Appleton Hall High School – a state comprehensive school that had previously been a grammar school – in Appleton, Warrington. A childhood friend, Louise Weir, described her as "more emotionally intelligent than academic", charming and always able to get what she wanted out of people.

Brooks's trial over the phone-hacking claims began on 28 October 2013.

On 31 October 2013 it was revealed she had had an affair lasting at least six years with Andy Coulson, another key figure in the phone-hacking scandal.

On 11 May 2012 Brooks appeared as a witness in the Leveson Inquiry.

On 15 May 2012, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) charged Brooks and five others with conspiring to pervert the course of justice. Charged along with Brooks regarding removal of documents and computers to conceal them from investigating detectives were her husband, her personal assistant, her bodyguard, her chauffeur, and the head of security at News International. These charges were made about 1 year after the Metropolitan Police Service reopened its dormant investigation into phone hacking, about 3 years after the then Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service told the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee that "no additional evidence has come to light," five years after News International executives began claiming that phone hacking was the work of a single "rogue reporter", 10 years after The Guardian began reporting that the Met had evidence of widespread illegal acquisition of confidential information, and 13 years after the Met began accumulating "boxloads" of that evidence, including information sources for News of the World journalists, but kept it unexamined in trash bags at Scotland Yard.

It was announced by Bell Pottinger that Rebekah and Charlie Brooks were expecting a daughter in early 2012 via a surrogate mother. A daughter was born at the private Portland Hospital in London on 25 January 2012.

In 2011, The Guardian and a solicitor alleged that in 2002, when Brooks was editor, the paper had hacked the voicemail of missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler (later found to be murdered), to access messages left by her parents. It was later established that Brooks had been on holiday and out of the country when the story which referred to a message on the schoolgirl's phone was published and that, consequently, she did not edit the paper that day or read the article in question and, therefore, could not have known about the phone hacking. She was found not guilty of phone hacking at her trial in 2014.

In July 2011, Labour Party leader Ed Miliband said Brooks should "consider her position" after the Milly Dowler allegations. Prime Minister David Cameron said that if Brooks had offered her resignation to him, he would have accepted it. Milly Dowler's parents also called for Brooks's resignation.

Having previously had an offer of resignation rejected, Brooks resigned from News International on 15 July 2011. She said, "As chief executive of the company, I feel a deep sense of responsibility for the people we have hurt and I want to reiterate how sorry I am for what we now know to have taken place. I have believed that the right and responsible action has been to lead us through the heat of the crisis. However my desire to remain on the bridge has made me a focal point of the debate. This is now detracting attention from all our honest endeavours to fix the problems of the past. Therefore I have given Rupert and James Murdoch my resignation. While it has been a subject of discussion, this time my resignation has been accepted".

On 17 July 2011, Brooks was arrested by police on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications and on suspicion of corruption allegations. She was arrested by detectives working on Operation Weeting, the Metropolitan Police's phone hacking probe, and Operation Elveden, the probe examining illicit payments to police officers. Brooks's public relations agent Dave Wilson told CNN that she did not know she was going to be arrested when she arrived for a pre-arranged interview with London's Metropolitan Police Service. After 12 hours in custody, Brooks was released on bail until October 2011. On 13 March 2012, Brooks was rearrested, together with her husband, on suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Ninety people have been arrested in conjunction with illegal acquisition of confidential information since police renewed investigations in 2011, many of them employees or agents of newspapers for which Brooks had responsibilities. Sixteen have been formally charged with crimes.

Her ex-husband Ross Kemp appeared in the Labour Party party election broadcast for the 2010 UK General Elections.

In June 2009, it was announced that she would leave The Sun in September 2009, to become chief executive of the newspaper's parent company, News International. Dominic Mohan was named her successor as editor of The Sun.

The press have noted social ties between Brooks and various members of the Establishment. In 2008 she borrowed a retired police horse from the Metropolitan Police which she kept on her Oxfordshire farm, where it was ridden by David Cameron. In December 2010, a dinner party was attended by Cameron and James Murdoch. Brooks was once also a friend of Tony and Cherie Blair; and Gordon and Sarah Brown. Her wedding to Charlie Brooks in 2009 was attended by Gordon Brown and David Cameron.

Private Eye and The Independent reported the couple had separated; this was not widely reported in the remainder of the British press. The 7 March 2008 issue of Private Eye refers to her "paramour", former racehorse trainer and author Charlie Brooks. The Guardian reported on 5 June 2009 that she was to marry Brooks. The Independent reported Brooks and her fiancé had married in a lakeside ceremony in June 2009. The couple are key members of the Chipping Norton set, and live in Churchill, Oxfordshire, and London.

A police enquiry revealed that the News of the World had a routine practice of intercepting mobile phone messages of celebrities, politicians and other public figures. The newspaper's reporter, Clive Goodman, and Glenn Mulcaire, a hired investigator, were convicted and jailed for intercepting the phone messages of members of the Royal Family in 2006.

Brooks became engaged to actor Ross Kemp (best known for portraying the character Grant Mitchell in EastEnders) in 1996, and married him in June 2002 in Las Vegas. On 3 November 2005, it was reported that Brooks had been arrested following an alleged assault on her husband. She was released without charge, and the police took no further action. The Sun had been running a campaign against domestic violence at the time. The couple had spent the previous evening in the company of the former Cabinet Minister David Blunkett, who had resigned for the second time on that day. At her trial in 2013, it was revealed that Brooks and her colleague Andy Coulson had an affair between mid-1998 to around 2007, during her marriage to Kemp.

In Brooks's entry in Who's Who she stated that she had studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, but did not claim to have a degree, and did not later answer questions about this. In a 2003 Spectator article, Stephen Glover suggested that, since she was working at the age of 20 for the News of the World, "we can safely assume that she did not study at the Sorbonne in any meaningful way". In 2010, Brooks was awarded an honorary Fellowship from the University of the Arts, London, for her contribution to journalism. She attended the London College of Communication, now part of the university, as a student.

In January 2003, she returned to The Sun, replacing her former boss David Yelland, to become its first female editor. On Brooks's first day as editor, the Page 3 girl was Rebekah Parmar-Teasdale – the caption to the picture was "Rebekah from Wapping". Soon after becoming editor, Brooks ran the headline "Bonkers Bruno Locked Up" concerning the mental health problems of former heavyweight boxing champion Frank Bruno. The next day The Sun ran a 600-word reply from the head of the mental health charity SANE and since then has adopted a style guide on covering mental health stories prepared by the same charity. Brooks and her husband spent a day with the head of SANE and made donations to the charity.

During a March 2003 appearance before the House of Commons Select committee on Culture, Media and Sport as part of an inquiry into privacy issues, Brooks stated that her newspaper had paid police for information. Alison Clark, the director of corporate affairs at News International, later stated, "It is not company practice to pay police for information."

Brooks has been chairman of the organisation Women in Journalism and has served as a judge for the "Guardian Student Media Awards" in November 2003 and the tenth annual Police Bravery Awards in July 2005, the latter sponsored by The Sun.

In 2003, under questioning by the Chris Bryant MP of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee of the House of Commons, Brooks and Andy Coulson were asked whether either of their newspapers had ever been involved in various improper acts. Brooks replied "We have paid police for information in the past". Andy Coulson stepped in to say that payments were only made lawfully. The Sun, of which Brooks was editor, subsequently ridiculed Chris Bryant in a number of articles, starting with one about a photograph of him in his underpants from a gay dating website. Bryant has publicly alleged that his phone was hacked in 2003 by the News of the World, the paper which Brooks had been editor of until that year before being succeeded by Coulson (News International was later ordered to pay Bryant £30,000 by a High Court judge in 2012 after Bryant filed a lawsuit). Brooks later claimed that in her response to Bryant's question she had merely been speaking about the widespread belief that payments had been made to police and denied having any knowledge of specific payments.

Brooks was a prominent figure in the News International phone hacking scandal, having been the editor of the News of the World from 2000 to 2003 when one of the stories which involved illegal phone hacking was carried out by the newspaper. Following a criminal trial in 2014 she was cleared of all charges by a jury at the Old Bailey, which accepted her defence: that in the circumstances she had no knowledge of the illegal acts carried out by staff at the newspaper.

She joined the Sunday newspaper News of the World in 1989 as a secretary, before working as a feature writer for its Sunday magazine, eventually becoming the paper's deputy editor. In 1994, she prepared for the News of the World' s interview with James Hewitt, a lover of Diana, Princess of Wales, by reserving a hotel suite and hiring a team to "kit it out with secret tape devices in various flowerpots and cupboards", Piers Morgan, her former boss, wrote in his memoir The Insider, The New York Times relayed in July 2011. In 1998, she transferred to the News of the World' s daily counterpart, The Sun for a short time. She then returned to the News of the World in 2000 as editor; at the time, she was the youngest editor of a national British newspaper.

Rebekah Mary Brooks (née  Wade; born 27 May 1968) is a British journalist and former newspaper editor. She was chief executive officer of News International from 2009 to 2011, having previously served as the youngest editor of a British national newspaper at News of the World, from 2000 to 2003, and the first female editor of The Sun, from 2003 to 2009. Brooks married actor Ross Kemp in 2002. They divorced in 2009 and she married former racehorse trainer and author Charlie Brooks.