Mary-Ellen Field was in a job she loved, working for Elle Macpherson. Then it all fell apart: she was accused of leaking information about the supermodel, and ended up in rehab. This week she gave evidence at the Leveson inquiry. Now she just wants it all to be over
Mary-Ellen Field is recalling the moment the supermodel Elle Macpherson accused her of being an alcoholic. "I remember it well because it was six years ago this morning," she tells me as we sit in the boardroom of Brand Finance, her brand valuation consultancy in London's Haymarket. "She came in, put her arms around me and was kissing me, and then she said: 'I'm really sorry about this but I'm here to help you.'
"I said: 'What have I done?' She said: 'I know why you drank.' I said: 'What are you talking about?'" Field goes on to repeat the claim she made to the Leveson inquiry into press ethics this week that Macpherson suggested she drank to cover up the guilt of having a handicapped child.
Field's eldest son, Justin, now aged 30, suffered brain damage during an operation when he was one year old and now requires constant care. Field shows me a family photo on her iPad. "You wouldn't know to look at him, but speak to him for a moment and you'd know he was handicapped." Justin currently works at a TK Maxx store.
Field says she was mystified about why Macpherson was referring to her son, and says she has never felt guilt about him.
Macpherson went on to accuse Field of leaking personal stories to the press while drunk. Field says the accusations were completely unexpected. As she told the inquiry earlier this week, she had "tremendous fun" working with Macpherson for two and a half years. "All the time I worked with her I found her to be very nice. She always did what she said, she was always on time, generous and kind to me. We had a great time together." They bonded partly because both women were raised in Sydney.
At the time, Field was head of intellectual property and creative services for the tax advisory and accountancy firm Chiltern. She advised Macpherson on business matters, including trademark licences for her lingerie.
During her 30-minute one-to-one meeting six years ago, Macpherson accused Field of leaking stories about the breakdown of her relationship with financier Arpad Busson. One story concerned the custody of the couple's children. Field says she had been privy to a discussion about this at a meeting with Macpherson's family lawyer, but denies being the source of the leaks. "I didn't even know any journalist to leak to … She said there were 11 things I had been responsible for. I said: 'What were they?' And she said: 'I'm not allowed to tell you. You'll have excuses.'"
Field says she was already worried about where the stories were coming from. "We didn't know about phone hacking then, but I wouldn't have had her phone swept for bugs if I wasn't worried." It eventually emerged that the probable source of the stories were voicemails that had been hacked by private investigator Glenn Mulcaire for the News of the World. Not only had Macpherson's phones been hacked, but also two belonging to Field.
After the meeting with Macpherson, Field, confused and hurt, asked to see her husband, Bruce Westwood. He was called into the room, along with Macpherson's lawyer and two colleagues from Chiltern. "They repeated the accusations. My husband was furious. And then they insisted I go to the Meadows [a rehab clinic in Arizona]."
Why, I suggest to Field, didn't she tell them to get stuffed, given that she had no alcohol problem? "I know it was stupid to do it, very stupid, but they just kept at me and at me. She made me sit in her car on the Friday after the meeting, and said: 'I love you so much. We're doing this for you. We know you didn't want to talk to the media.' The idea was I was drunk and did it unintentionally."
But there was a more pragmatic reason that Field felt obliged to attend rehab. If she hadn't, she says Chiltern would have fired her. But couldn't she then have sued for constructive dismissal? "I wouldn't have had any income had I done that, and all the benefits I'd accrued would have gone. I needed the job – I still had a child at university [her younger son, Tim, now aged 29] and I had to look after Justin."
So Field went to rehab for five weeks. She stayed, she says, in Macpherson's old room – the former model checked in to the clinic in 2003 suffering from post-natal depression – at a cost of $50,000. "She thought she was doing a good turn. Her story to me was, 'I know you didn't mean to do this, you did it when you were drunk, but I was never an alcoholic."
Field had got the impression that rehab would be like a spa. It was not, she says. "There were no plugs in the basins so you couldn't drown yourself. They also didn't allow us to have nail varnish. Did you know you could kill yourself with nail varnish?" Field, who has been putting on eye makeup as we talk, in preparation for attending the Leveson inquiry, allows herself a hearty laugh.
Fellow patients, she says, included sex addicts ("they all wore signs saying 'I'm a sex addict' and weren't allowed to come within 10 feet of a woman"), celebrities whose names she declines to disclose, as well as "lots of beautiful airheads" and a disproportionate number of investment bankers. She was offered antidepressants, which she declined, and was refused her customary two half hours a day on the treadmill at the gym. "They said that meant I was obsessive."
She did, though, learn something in rehab, she says. "They said I wasn't an alcoholic, nor did I have a problem with substance abuse, but that I had clearly been bullied. They said that I had been a victim of what's called an intervention. It's like extraordinary rendition, except that the CIA isn't involved and they don't use chains."
Five weeks later, Field returned to London, ready to start work again. But she was fired by Macpherson. As a result, she says, her health suffered and she was signed off work from January. "I kept falling over for no reason. Pretty ironic for someone accused of being an alcoholic, right?" In fact, Field was later diagnosed with vasovagal syncope, a neurological condition. "My heart was pumping blood to my brain fast enough that I would pass out." She claims her condition was caused by the stress of her treatment, not just by Macpherson, but by her employers, Chiltern, who sacked her in March 2006.
In August that year, she started to realise how the newspapers had got the stories about Macpherson. News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman and Mulcaire were arrested and she realised that her former client's phones were among those hacked at the behest of Rupert Murdoch's journalists.
Her health continued to suffer. A keen cyclist, she fell off her bike in Richmond Park. "My heart stopped working for 18 seconds and I would pass out." In 2009, she had a pacemaker fitted.
Field says she doesn't bear Macpherson any animus. "I still personally didn't hold her responsible. I don't want you to intimate that this is a crusade against Elle, because she's a victim just like I was. She's the one that's suffering. Nobody's writing anything bad about me. She's getting all the bad press."
This isn't quite true. Earlier this week, an article appeared in the Daily Telegraph with the strapline: "Lingerie magnate and evergreen supermodel Elle Macpherson talks to Luke Leitch about nipples, nudity and the 'News of the World'." Even though Field gave evidence at the Leveson inquiry the day before the story appeared, it did not mention her by name. Instead, when asked why she has said nothing about being one of the six earliest-identified victims of Mulcaire, Macpherson replied: "I believe I've made the right choice. And I made that choice years ago, because I did not want to perpetuate stories. I did not want to be involved, I did not enter into the discussions whatsoever."
But many reader comments on the online version of the interview drew attention to the timing of the piece, and what Macpherson had done to Field. One, for instance, read: "I would suggest that the timing of this article is dreadful. If this is damage limitation, it has had the opposite effect. I watched the whole of yesterday's evidence to the inquiry and was shocked by the details regarding the treatment of Ms Macpherson's aide."
Why does Field think this interview appeared now? As a person whose job it is to value brands, Field's opinion is informed, to say the least: "It was organised, we imagine, by the crisis management company they've hired."
Field has more to think about than her former client's business matters. She is suing another Australian (Rupert Murdoch) for damages and lost income. That case is expected to be heard next year. But there is a worry: "It's more than possible they could shut everything down so there's nothing to sue. People do that all the time." She tells me she is back in work and her health is much improved. "I'm doing better than my lawyer." Her lawyer, Mark Lewis, was interviewed in the London Evening Standard earlier this week under the headline: "My MS consultant told me not to do anything stressful – so I went after Murdoch's phone hackers".
That said, she is obviously still a bit fragile. She tells me that, on the way to this interview, she got a call from a journalist who said that his editor wanted to know how she could abandon her brain-damaged child to go to rehab. "It shouldn't upset me, but it really does. It's so sexist – as though Justin didn't have a dad or the rest of the family to care for him."
She was asked to testify at the inquiry, she says, because she was thought to be a victim of phone hacking who could stand up to the pressure. During the hearings, she says, she has been heartened by the camaraderie of other claimants who have given evidence at the Leveson inquiry. "But I feel such a fraud when I'm in the same room as the Dowlers or some of the other people, most of them not celebrities, who have suffered phone hacking. I was collateral damage, not someone who was targeted.
"Some papers have been trying to portray the drinks meeting we claimants had as a Trotskyist plot." She laughs. "That's pretty rich given that I'm deputy chairman of the [local] Conservative party and a member of the Carlton club."
Field also wants to make a rather more surprising point. "It's only thanks to journalists that I'm doing this. Thanks to you guys [she means the Guardian, to whom she gave her first interview about phone hacking two years ago], the New York Times, and some great journalists at the Sydney Morning Herald and ABC in Australia who backed me. It was down to them that we really found out what happened and nailed them."
As we end the interview, the 62-year-old businesswoman tells me she makes it look as though she's coping, when she isn't. She's sleeping two hours a night, her husband has been thoroughly depressed by her ordeal, her mother back home in Australia isn't speaking to her. Why? "She doesn't think I should talk about private stuff. She's 85. But my late father, I think, would have been proud of me for standing up and being counted."
And then she wells up, as she has done a few times during the interview, when she tells me: "I really want this to be over. It's been six years today since my life was destroyed. I loved my job – I used to get in at 7.30 in the morning because I loved it so much. Just pigs, they are, for what they did to me."