Paul McMullan (born 1963) is a British former tabloid journalist. He was educated at Trinity School, Croydon and Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology and Université de Lille. Journalism career McMullan started his newspaper career at the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, then the Rhondda Leader in Wales, before moving to London to work on the nationals. While shifting on The Sun and Today he briefly took a job as news editor of the Sunday Sport. He went on to work as a features journalist at the now-defunct News of the World between 1994 and 2001, briefly becoming deputy features editor in 2000. In 2011, McMullan admitted to regrets over a series of articles he had written in the 1990s about Jennifer Elliott, the daughter of actor Denholm Elliott. McMullan had obtained information from the police that she had been living on the streets and working as a prostitute. She committed suicide in 2003. In July 2011, the comedian Steve Coogan described him as "morally bankrupt" after appearing with him on BBC2's Newsnight. The actor Hugh Grant secretly taped him making claims about phone hacking in a visit to McMullan's pub, The Castle Inn in Dover. McMullan asked Grant during the conversation, "Are you taping me? If you are, good luck to you; I don't really care anyway." He was one of only a few journalists to claim on the record that phone hacking was rife at the newspaper. In November 2011 he made a notable contribution to the Leveson Inquiry where he not only confessed to a wide range of illegal activities in the pursuit of news but defended them as necessary. In his testimony he opposed the concept of privacy, despite claiming his own personal privacy being compromised, and that he had long disguised his personal whereabouts and circumstances, primarily by registering himself (for various purposes) at his parents' home address. McMullan notably told the enquiry that "Privacy is for paedos". McMullan testified to having undertaken a wide range of illegal or unethical activities to get stories besides phone hacking: bribing police officers, stealing documents, going through celebrities' rubbish bins, and at one point posing as a "teenage rent boy" to entrap a paedophile priest. "[I]t was hard to think of any dubious news-gathering technique he had not confessed to," wrote New York Times reporter Sarah Lyall, "short of pistol-whipping sources for information." He defended those techniques as "perfectly acceptable