In a startling further admission, Starmer revealed that Rebekah Brooks, along with her husband, the racehorse trainer Charlie Brooks, now have their own dedicated police investigation—Operation Sacha, which relates to last month’s arrests of the couple under suspicion of attempting to pervert the course of justice, a serious charge that carries a potential seven-year sentence, although the specific allegations underlying such a charge remain unknown.

Starmer also confirmed that one of the four current files relates to alleged attempts to cover up the scale phone hacking. The other three cases relate to potential misconduct under the data protection act, along with misconduct in a public office; potential witness intimidation and harassment; and a potential breach of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which relates to the interception of communications.

Last summer, Charlie Brooks became embroiled in the scandal following an unusual incident in a car-park near the couple’s London home. In the incident, he reportedly tried to reclaim a bag containing a computer, paperwork, and a phone that had been discovered in the car-park. Instead, security guards handed the bag over to the police. Charlie Brooks denied that the bag belonged to his wife, and his official spokesman, David Wilson, said that the bag contained “nothing to do with Rebekah or the [phone-hacking] case.”

Nevertheless, it was a large severance package for Brooks, and it likely got News Corp. more than just her resignation. Erika Collins, a partner in the employment department of the Paul Hastings law firm in New York, says Brooks almost certainly had to sign a waiver of any claims against News Corp., confirming she could never sue the company.

News Corp. likely also demanded a nondisparagement clause, saying Brooks could never speak ill of her former company. Such a clause could apply forever, so not only would Brooks be barred from running to The Guardian and trash-talking her former employers now, she’d be prevented from writing a scandalous tell-all decades from now. Brooks may have asked for a mutual nondisparagement clause, says Collins, but it’s not clear that News Corp. would give it to her.

Brooks likely also signed a confidentiality agreement, says Robert Bartlett, a professor at Berkeley Law. Not only would it keep her from talking about her employment at News Corp., it would keep her from talking about the settlement agreement that keeps her from talking about her employment at News Corp.

Neither the confidentiality obligation nor the nondisparagement clause will help Brooks before Parliament. There’s usually an exception for legal process written into these clauses, says Bartlett, and even if there isn’t, no settlement agreement would be able to prevent an employee from cooperating with the law.

And it will be James Murdoch, too, who can expect the toughest ride when shareholders meet on Friday at the News Corp. AGM in Los Angeles. To be helpful, The New York Times, long the butt of Murdoch’s acerbic New York Post, reported that father and son are now at each others’ throats and spend days not talking. “You’re coming back to New York or you’re out,” Rupert is said to have snarled at James, whom he suspected of setting up a rival power base in Europe. “This is one company, not two. And it is run out of New York.”

News Corp AGMs are usually lame, ill-attended affairs, with a benign Rupert indulging shareholders who complain about Fox News or a new Fox movie. This time, though, the theft of private phone messages from celebrities and victims of crime, among them a murdered schoolgirl, promises to turn the snooze-fest into a circus. Angered by his rough treatment at the hands of the Brits, whose bobbies could not save him from having a plate of shaving foam pressed in his face, Murdoch has insisted there can be no repetition of what he described in July as “the most humble day of my life.”

To this end, the AGM, once held in the tranquil Asia Society on Park Avenue, has been switched to the safety of the Fox movie lot in Los Angeles. There is nothing like a media company in deep trouble for keeping journalists from doing their jobs. Reporters, just one per publication, armed with photo ID and credentials, must assemble at a parking garage to be bussed in to the studio, to dodge the protesters expected at the gates. The press may not ask questions at the meeting. The company that founded the Fox network, Fox News, and Fox Business insists that no TV cameras record the scene. As a concession to those unable to trek to the Coast, there will be an online audio stream.

Murdoch’s siege mentality is understandable, perhaps, in face of the unprecedented assaults on a company led by a man who is more used to dishing the dirt on his opponents than on ducking incoming flak. One set of shareholders is suing News Corp. because it is deemed to have overpaid for Shine, Rupert’s daughter Elizabeth’s London film company that gave her $214 million clear profit. Citing “rampant nepotism,” the writ says that “Murdoch has treated News Corp. like a family candy jar, which he raids whenever his appetite strikes.”