This article is from the archive of our partner .
Rebekah Brooks spoke to her staff on Friday afternoon and seemed to acknowledge the overwhelming rush of calls for her resignation. "You may be angry with me, I understand," she reportedly said at the off-the-record meeting. "But I'm angry at the people who did this and feel bitterly betrayed." Brooks also said the News of the World brand had become "toxic" and that she's staying on because she's a "conductor for it all."
Calls for Rebekah Brooks's resignation are quickly evolving into calls for her arrest as more details are uncovered in the News of the World phone hacking scandal. The News Corp. CEO was editor of News of the World at the time reporters there hacked into murdered teenager Milly Dowler's phone and later confessed to a panel of members of Parliament that she had paid police officers for information. Now, former Metropolitan police chief Brian Paddick can't imagine why police wouldn't bring Brooks in. "If Andy Coulson has been arrested, it is inevitable that Rebekah Brooks will get an invitation from the police that she can not refuse," said Paddick.
In his first press conference since the phone hacking scandal's latest flare up, British Prime Minister David Cameron placed News Corp.'s deputy chief operating officer James Murdoch alongside Rebekah Brooks in the lineup of people to be questioned by police:
It won’t be a question of whether they have jobs or whether they are going to resign from those jobs, it’s a question of whether they are going to be prosecuted, whether they are going to be convicted, whether they are going to be punished. That is what is going to happen. …
I don’t know what these people at News International did know or didn’t know. Frankly, I don’t think any of us know. The key thing is that they are going to be investigated to the police.
But what exactly do police want to know from News Corp. leadership? Probably more details about the allegation that an executive "may have deleted millions of emails from an internal archive, in an apparent attempt to obstruct Scotland Yard's inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal."