Rebekah Brooks, the former boss of Rupert Murdoch's British newspaper arm, was acquitted Tuesday of orchestrating a campaign to hack into phones and bribe officials in a case that has shaken the British political establishment.
A jury at London's Old Bailey court cleared Brooks unanimously but found Andy Coulson — her former lover and Prime Minister David Cameron's ex-media chief — guilty of conspiring to intercept messages to break news about royalty, celebrities and victims of crime.
The conviction in one of the most expensive criminal trials in British legal history forced Cameron to apologize for hiring Coulson in 2007 when the Conservative leader gave him a "second chance" after he had already quit one of Murdoch's newspapers as the hacking scandal brewed.