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By DAVID M. HALBFINGER and ALLISON HOPE WEINER
APRIL 12, 2007
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LOS ANGELES, April 11 — Back in 2001, when the actress Elizabeth Hurley announced that she was pregnant by Steve Bing, a Hollywood producer, only to have him question whether he was the baby’s father, the British tabloids pounced. They branded him “Bing Laden,” and The Daily Mail of London reported that he and his Los Angeles lawyer had hired the private eye Anthony Pellicano to dig up dirt to destroy Ms. Hurley’s reputation.
But after Mr. Bing complained that the newspaper report was false, and his legal team produced a sworn declaration to that effect from Mr. Pellicano, The Daily Mail capitulated in 2003, issuing a retraction and reaching a financial settlement that Mr. Bing’s Los Angeles lawyer, Martin D. Singer, called “substantial.”
Now, however, evidence unearthed by federal investigators here shows Mr. Pellicano repeatedly talking about his work for Mr. Bing in connection with Ms. Hurley. And The Daily Mail may try to recover its costly settlement with Mr. Bing.
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Elizabeth Hurley and Steve Bing, when they were an item in 2001. Credit Jim Ruymen/Reuters
Julian Darrall, a lawyer for the owner of The Daily Mail, Associated Newspapers Ltd., said  if Mr. Pellicano’s declaration or a sworn statement of case filed on behalf of Mr. Bing and Mr. Singer were shown to be false, the publisher “would reserve the right to take such action as appropriate in relation to the 2003 settlement.”
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Mr. Singer on Wednesday insisted that Mr. Pellicano’s declaration had been accurate, that Mr. Pellicano had done  no work for Mr. Bing related to Ms. Hurley and that anything he might have told anyone to the contrary had been  “an absolute lie.”
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Mr. Pellicano, a Hollywood fixture who stands accused of masterminding a long-running wiretapping ring on behalf of many entertainment industry clients, is in jail awaiting trial on Aug. 22. The prospect of new litigation in the English courts shows how widely the ripples of the Pellicano investigation have spread. Already, more than a dozen people (including the actor Keith Carradine) have filed lawsuits after learning from prosecutors or news reports that their telephones were tapped by Mr. Pellicano or that he had otherwise invaded their privacy. Last week a Los Angeles judge delayed proceedings in many of those suits until after the criminal trial.
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Private investigator Anthony Pellicano in Los Angeles. Credit Brian Vander Brug/Los Angeles Times, via Associated Press
In his sworn declaration, dated January 2002 but sent to lawyers for The Daily Mail a year later, Mr. Pellicano said he had “never been engaged by Mr. Bing nor his attorney Mr. Martin Singer to investigate anyone on Mr. Bing’s behalf, including Ms. Hurley.” He also denied that he had been contacted by Mr. Bing or Mr. Singer about Ms. Hurley, or that he had ever “discussed anything” about Mr. Bing or Ms. Hurley “with any member of the press including The Daily Mail at any time.”
Largely on the strength of Mr. Pellicano’s declaration, The Daily Mail settled. It published a retraction saying “there was no truth in the allegations,” and a lawyer for the paper apologized before a High Court judge.
But evidence turned up in the Los Angeles wiretapping case shows that Mr. Bing, the heir to a real estate fortune and producer of movies like “The Polar Express” and the forthcoming “Beowulf,” paid Mr. Pellicano thousands of dollars as early as 2000 and continuing at least through August 2002, four months after Ms. Hurley’s son was born. The documents do not show whether any of the money was for work related to Ms. Hurley or even if it was a payment for services.
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Steve Bings check, above, to the Hollywood private eye Anthony Pellicano, right, came with a note that said, Thanks.
The evidence, much of it obtained by The New York Times, also includes audio recordings from April and May 2002 in which Mr. Pellicano boasts that he has been “working for,” “consulting for” or speaking for Mr. Bing about Ms. Hurley’s pregnancy with reporters for news outlets like People magazine.
On April 30, 2002, for example, Mr. Pellicano bragged to a client that he was working for Mr. Bing on the Hurley case, “though I haven’t admitted it to anybody,” and confided that he believed he knew the true paternity of Ms. Hurley’s child. (A DNA test seven weeks later proved that Mr. Bing was the father.)
Mr. Pellicano’s lawyer, Steven F. Gruel, had no comment.
Many of the recordings in which Mr. Pellicano speaks about his work for Mr. Bing are of telephone calls between Mr. Pellicano and a lawyer for Kirk Kerkorian, the billionaire investor, who was grappling with another paternity dispute: he had been paying child support for a girl who was not his daughter. As it turned out, that girl’s biological father was also Mr. Bing.
Mr. Singer said he knew of no payments by Mr. Bing to Mr. Pellicano, but said if any existed, they had nothing to do with Ms. Hurley. “Mr. Pellicano did nothing for Mr. Bing in the Hurley case,” he said. “Nothing.”
Whatever the reason for Mr. Bing’s checks to Mr. Pellicano, they were sizable. The federal evidence includes checks from Mr. Bing to Mr. Pellicano for $25,000 on June 22, 2000; for $60,000 on June 25, 2002; and for $250,000 on Aug. 5, 2002. That last check was accompanied by a handwritten note, with a one-word message: “Thanks.”
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