Ex-Corrie star Shobna Gulati relives phone hacking ordeal

Photo: Oldham Chronicle

Emotional: Shobna Gulati leaves court yesterday

Shaw actress Shobna Gulati has told the High Court how phone hacking led to her son being bullied at school.

Ms Gulati, who played Sunita Alahan in Coronation Street, gave evidence at a hearing to decide the amount of compensation to be awarded in eight representative cases brought against Mirror Group Newspapers.

Her phone started to be hacked from 2003, two years after she joined the series.

She told the court how at one point she wrote to the Press Complaints Commission after an article appeared in the Sunday Mirror about her “secret marriage”.

She said “salacious gossip” about her past affected her son, who was nine at the time, and he was bullied “quite extensively” at school about who his father was.

“I’m a single mum living on my own with my son. I believed it wasn’t in the public interest that the parentage of my child would be debated in a Sunday newspaper so I wrote this letter.”

Shocked at the story being in the paper and not knowing where the information had come from, she was concerned her new partner had released the story.

“Obviously he hadn’t, but I accused him and our relationship fell by the wayside.”

Ms Gulati said when her son was 11 he ran away from home after another article said she had been “dumped” both by her lover and bosses at “Coronation Street” and might be going into the jungle for “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!”

The 48-year-old actress said she had never been offered the reality show but humorously referred to the possibility on voice mails she left.

Though she hadn’t spoken about the end of her relationship, she had left many voice mails for her boyfriend. Breaking down briefly, she added: “These voicemails were very, very deeply personal.”