Court Grants Hugh, Liz Cash for Flash Pics

Hugh Grant and Elizabeth Hurley accept $113,000 in damages over unauthorized holiday snaps

By Gina Serpe May 15, 2008 2:53 PMTags
Elizabeth Hurley, Hugh GrantKevin Mazur/WireImage.com

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but in Elizabeth Hurley and Hugh Grant's case, it's also worth about a hundred times that in cold hard cash.

The ex-couple, along with Hurley's current husband, Arun Nayar, have accepted nearly $113,000 in invasion-of-privacy damages from two European paparazzi agencies that snapped shots of the close-knit trio on vacation in the Maldives last year.

Particularly "reprehensible" to the threesome was that both the U.K.'s Big Pictures Ltd. and France's Eliot Press Sarl saw fit to take and sell photos of Hurley's Little Lord Fauntleroy-channeling son, Damian, naked on the beach.

Photos of the group were snapped up by News of the World and the Mail on Sunday and published last October under the cheeky headlines "Liz Does the Blokey-Cokey" and "Hugh's That Gooseberry?" and appeared both in the print and online editions.

In addition to the payout, which the trio plans on donating to a cancer charity, they also accepted public apologies from the paparazzi agencies for the unauthorized shots, which Laura Tyler, the attorney for the group, called "most upsetting," particularly as the friends had selected the private resort to avoid such illicit long-lensed snaps.

And bad tabloid puns.