Heather Mills has said she did not leak a voicemail of Paul McCartney begging her for forgiveness to CNN talk-show host Piers Morgan, saying the recording he has boasted of hearing had been illegally hacked.
Piers Morgan has consistently denied he authorised the use of phone-hacking in his days as a tabloid newspaper editor in Britain.
He has not offered an explanation for how he came to hear the message left on Heather Mills' mobile phone.
The accusation has dragged Mr Morgan into the phone-hacking scandal which has damaged Rupert Murdoch's media empire and has had wide ramifications for the entire British press.
Giving evidence to an inquiry into British media ethics, Ms Mills said she had left a house she shared with Mr McCartney in early 2001 after they had had a row and turned her phone off.
The next morning she said she had received about 25 messages on her phone, all of which appeared to have been listened to, including one in which Paul McCartney "sang a little ditty of one of his songs". She said she deleted the messages.
Later that day, a reporter called her to say he had heard the couple had argued and that the former Beatle had left a message in which he sang to her. This, she told the inquiry, could only have come from her phone being hacked.
The inquiry was told the unnamed reporter was a former employee from the Trinity Mirror Group though not from the Daily Mirror, one of the group's papers, which Mr Morgan edited from 1995 to 2004.
Asked if she had ever made a recording of Mr McCartney's call or had played it to Mr Morgan herself, Ms Mills said: "Never".
Heather Mills, who married Paul McCartney in 2002 and divorced him six years later, said Mr Morgan, "a man that has written nothing but awful things about me for years", would have relished telling the inquiry if she had played a personal voicemail message to him.
Giving evidence in December, Piers Morgan, who bragged about hearing the message in a newspaper column in 2006, refused to say who had played him the recorded message of the call, saying he was protecting a source.
He also edited the now defunct News of the World tabloid at the centre of the hacking scandal from 1994 to 1995, though his tenure was before the practice became rife. He has boasted that he knew about phone-hacking well before the scandal broke, but subsequently said he was referring to rumours.
Mr Morgan has written in his diaries about a "little trick" for eavesdropping on voicemails that he heard of as early as 2001.
One former Mirror employer has told the inquiry hacking was widespread on the paper when Mr Morgan was editor, and Trinity's chief executive has said some reporters might have secretly engaged in the practice.
Clifford in Leveson evidence
Later, PR guru Max Clifford said he had reached a private settlement amounting to nearly £1m with Rebekah Brooks after his phone was hacked.
He told the inquiry he was warning clients about what they said on the telephone as far back as Muhammad Ali and Marlon Brando, "long before phone hacking".
He said the hacking scandal involved a minority of journalists, some of whom were "forced" into it.
Mr Clifford said he not only helped celebrities - some of whom pay him £200-250,000 a year - but people who found themselves in the midst of stories.
He said the Press Complaints Commission was "nowhere on the horizon" for Robert Murat, whom he helped despite him having no money, because he was on the verge of suicide.
"You have got to have a strong PCC, an independent PCC which is not financed by Fleet Street, which is prepared to be proactive, not just for stars and the so-called celebrities.
"They get plenty of protection, more protection than many of them deserve because they can afford to employ rich lawyers and expensive PR people like me to protect them.
"Ordinary members of the public have got no way at all and no protection."
He also told the inquiry that the story he provided to Piers Morgan about Cherie Blair's pregnancy was not obtained from phone hacking.
"It was from someone who was very close to Cherie Blair and she confided in.
"She told me. I gave it to Piers. It did not come out as a result of phone hacking."
