A Sun reporter has said he felt “sick” after Rebekah Brooks contacted him to give him tips on how to get through a criminal trial he faced over an email sent while she was editor of the paper.
Brooks, who was cleared of hacking and corrupt payment charges after a marathon trial last year, told John Troup he was in her “thoughts” and gave him advice on how to get over the shock of his trial.
Troup said it was “particularly winceworthy” given that he was charged because of a decision by the paper’s publisher to hand over internal Sun emails to the Metropolitan police.
The paper’s former East Anglia district reporter was acquitted of a single charge based on one email that appeared to link him to a payment request for a prison officer at White HMP Whitemoor in 2007.
It was apparently for a four-paragraph story in 2007 about a prisoner suicide but it transpired during the trial he didn’t write the story.
Troup said Brooks did not show any interest when he was dumped after 19 years on the paper, working on major stories including the Rosemary West murders. She was editor of the tabloid between 2003 and 2009 and was chief executive of News International when Troup was made redundant.
“Brooks? I don’t remember hearing anything after I was made redundant.
“But she sent me an email along with some of my other co-defendants at the beginning of the trial telling me how I should approach the whole thing, how I was in her thoughts and then sent another one at the end telling me how delighted she was for me.
“It made me feel a bit sick to be honest,” Troup told Tom Latchem in an interview on the internet station Fubar Radio.
During the trial, one of his co-defendants accused the Sun’s publisher, News International, of being a “copper’s nark” by handing over millions of internal emails at the Sun in order to “save the skin” of senior staff.
Troup said the charges were “particularly galling” as he had been made redundant in 2010 by the Sun and was then sacked by the local council he was working for before having a chance to prove himself innocent.
“A lot of the evidence that came out at my trial was these payments had been signed off by people at editor level. People who appeared to have been exempt from the whole process of passing on info from the Management Standards Committee to the Met police,” Troup said.
He said be was stunned to find himself under investigation – it transpired during the trial he had not even written the story at the centre of the case. He recalled how he received a call out of the blue from Metropolitan police detectives in 2013.
“I racked my brains to think if there was anything I might have a problem with and couldn’t think of anything, so I was quite stunned to be told the police wanted to speak to me.
“I, personally, have never done anything morally questionable,” he told Latchem.
He said he felt a “sense of betrayal having run through brick walls for him for the best part of 19 years” for the paper and that it was very difficult to reconcile his and others’ loyalty to the paper with the realisation that they had subsequently “had been ratted out in the worst possible way”.
He told how he was “frogmarched” out of Uttlesford District council when he was charged in 2013, plunging him into a perilous financial state as he faced a possible six-figure legal bill for his trial.
“I was summoned to a disciplinary meeting a couple of weeks later, but not before I had a call from the borough solicitor telling me that the disciplinary hearing I had been summoned to was likely to go against me and I might want to consider my position.
“I said ‘what do you mean consider the position’? He said: ‘you might want to consider resigning’.”
“I said ‘well I’m not resigning, I haven’t done anything wrong’.
“Looking back at it, it was a fairly cynical way to get me to forego any holiday pay and sick pay I night have been owed.
“But I had my day in court, if you like. I had my disciplinary hearing, stated my case, based on the fact that everyone should be considered innocent until proven guilt,y but they saw otherwise and I was dismissed.”
Initially, the Sun did not cover his legal fees, but after the intervention of the new editor David Dinsmore, the organisation decided to cover his costs. Troup said he found it difficult to rely on Murdoch for funding.
While on bail he made ends meet by working as a labourer on building sites and in a butcher’s shop in Norfolk .
Troup says, despite the nightmare of the trial, he would like to work for a police force.
“Bizarrely, I’d still love to do a job in the communications team for a police force, not the Metropolitan police, they can go and whistle as far as I’m concerned,” he said.
“If I apply for a job, they would have to give me an interview but whether they’d give me a job or not? It’s a shame because I really do believe in what the police do,” he said.
News Corp declined to comment on the allegations made by Troup.