He confessed to fabricating quotes to bulk out a story and “sanitising” comments from hacked voicemails to disguise their origin.
Timothy Langdale QC, for Andy Coulson, asked Evans where he had sourced a quote in the NoTW about Ms Miller receiving “tea and sympathy” after an upset.
Evans, who hacked phones at the paper before becoming a prosecution witness, said he would routinely try to devise plausible-sounding quotes that were likely to escape legal action. He said: “One of the things you try to do when filling out a quote is think: ‘Well, what would they do?’” Irritated by a stream of questions from Mr Langdale, he told the jury: “This is just tabloid quote fluff.”
About a further quote in the story from a “friend” who “revealed”: ‘Poor Sienna was in pieces on Sunday morning. She just didn’t know who to turn to..’, Mr Langdale asked Evans: “Where’s that come from?”. “As I described,” Evans said from the witness box. “A bit of made up ‘friend said’ quotery.”
He told the Old Bailey he would disguise comments he had hacked from voicemails, saying: “I can’t write exactly what’s on the voicemail. I have to clean it up, sanitise it.” Mr Langdale asked: “You’re saying to us that that passage may be just you making this up on the basis of having heard Sienna or her sister in tears leaving a voicemail message?” Evans replied: “Pretty much.”
He had difficulty remembering any specific phone message, he said, explaining: “I did hack thousands of voicemails during the time I was at the News of the World.”
Overnight, however, he said he had realised that a voicemail about Ms Miller being “tearful” may have been left by her sister – rather than Ms Miller herself, as he had stated in his earlier police statement and testimony. Evans said: “I’ll be honest, I don’t have perfect recall about what happened a long time ago but I do want to get things right and I don’t want to mislead anybody.”
Mr Coulson, who edited the News of the World between 2003 and 2007, denies conspiring to hack voicemails. The case continues.