Hugh Grant suggested today that a newspaper may have broken into his flat after he was caught with a prostitute in Hollywood.
The About a Boy star said he had "no quarrel" with the media for the coverage of his arrest for a "lewd act" on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles in 1995.
But he told the Leveson Inquiry into press standards that he had suspicions about an expert burglary at his fourth-floor flat in London shortly afterwards in which nothing was stolen.
Grant, who was in a relationship with Liz Hurley at the time, recalled: "The day after that a detailed account of what the interior of my flat looked like appeared in one of the British tabloid papers.
"This was at a time when there was a lot of press outside all the time desperate to get in. It was the middle of the summer and I know they were listening," he said. "It was four floors up and they could hear one or two of the rows I was having at the time, so I know they were desperate to get some kind of access."
Grant told the hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice in London he was happy to discuss his arrest by the Los Angeles Police Department over his encounter with prostitute Divine Brown.
Counsel to the inquiry, Robert Jay QC, said: "I'm not going to cover the events of July 1995. We are not interested in that."
Grant replied: "I wish you would in a way. I think it's an important point that I make in this statement that all the questioning and campaigning I've done recently about what I see as the abuses of some sections of the British press is emphatically not motivated by the treatment I got when I was arrested in 1995.
"I say in my statement I was arrested, it was on public record. I totally expected there to be tons of press, the press storm that happened. I have no quarrel with it, no quarrel whatsoever."
In April 2007, Grant accepted undisclosed libel damages over claims that his relationship with Jemima Khan was destroyed by a flirtation with a film executive - and his conduct over Liz Hurley's wedding.
The settlement of Grant's legal actions over articles in the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mail in February 2007 was announced at the High Court in London.
Grant's solicitor, Simon Smith, told Mr Justice Gray that the damages would be donated to the Marie Curie Cancer Care charity.
He said the first article - Hugh, Drew and the Jealousy of Jemima - alleged that Grant, while in a relationship with Ms Khan, was conducting a flirtation with a female senior Warner Bros executive.
It also claimed that he pretended to Ms Khan that his regular late-night calls with this woman were simply to discuss a movie, that Ms Khan's suspicion was the cause of such acute distress on her part that she barely ate for weeks, and that it was this that had finally destroyed their relationship.
A second article - Guess Hugh's free to join Liz at her wedding after all - asserted that he would be attending Hurley's wedding, would be making a speech and acting as an usher.
It added that as a wedding gift, he had sponsored a chimpanzee at a British zoo and had separately bought an extraordinarily expensive necklace and arranged for it to be inscribed with a personal message from him for Ms Hurley.
The article then alleged that Grant's actions amounted, as far as Ms Khan was concerned, to "a nail in the coffin" and "the last straw", thus causing the end of their relationship.
Mr Smith said that the publication of these numerous false allegations in quick succession caused hurt, embarrassment and distress to Grant and damage to both his personal and professional reputations.
Grant also referred to an article published earlier this year about him attending the emergency department at Chelsea and Westminster hospital in London.
The article, which appeared in the Sun and the Daily Express, showed him as a celebrity who waited patiently with everyone else in the ward. However, Grant said that by publishing him in a good light the tabloid was trying to "cover a breach of privacy".
He said: "This is an article that says that I went to hospital - it is my medical record saying I was dizzy with shortness of breath - which was a gross intrusion of my privacy.
"I think no one would expect their medical records to be made public or to be appropriated by newspapers for commercial profit. That is fundamental to our British sense of decency."
Grant told the newspapers that he would not file a lawsuit if each of the papers would donate £5,000 to Healthtalkonline. "The Express flatly refused to pay a penny...the Sun gave £1,500," he said.
He said he believed that someone at the hospital may be "on retainer" for a newspaper or an agency - when the worker would tip off the press if someone famous was to attend.
Grant said he experienced further press intrusion over his relationship with Chinese actress Tinglan Hong, who recently gave birth to his daughter.
The News of the World published a front-page story headlined "Hugh's Secret Girl" in April which speculated on whether Ms Hong was pregnant and featured pictures taken with a telephoto lens without the couple's knowledge.
Mr Jay suggested that the actor could have taken "pro-active" steps to protect his privacy by taking legal proceedings over this article.
Grant replied: "If I had done that, it would have drawn attention to the whole story.
"My overwhelming motive throughout this whole episode was to protect the mother of my child from a press storm, so anything like what you have just suggested would have been one way of alerting the media.
"It would have been a matter of public record and they would have thought 'Here's a good story'. Her life would have been made hell, as it subsequently was."
Grant visited Ms Hong in hospital in London the day after the baby was born in late September, the inquiry heard.
He told the hearing: "I had been very reluctant to be present at the birth because of the danger of a leak from the hospital bringing this press storm down on the mother of my child and what was about to be my child.
"So I had actually made a plan with the mother not to visit at all but to visit when she got home from hospital a few days later.
"She was very happy with that plan. She had her parents there and she had my female cousins there.
"But actually on the day after the birth I couldn't resist a quick visit. I thought I was going to try and get away with it. I went, had a look, it was very nice.
"But the day after that, I think it was, the phone calls started, from the Daily Mail in this case, saying 'We know about Tinglan having had the baby, we know about Hugh having visited, we know what name she checked in under, we're going to write this story'.
"So all my fears about the leak seemed to have been justified."
The inquiry heard that the Daily Mail did not run an article about the birth of Grant's child until the story was broken by an American magazine.
But Grant said: "I think the reason they didn't publish it was because they would not have looked good to have published it merely on leaked information from a hospital, which is unethical."
He provoked laughs when he described how he drafted a statement confirming the birth of his child over the phone to his publicist while filming in Germany and dressed as a cannibal.
In the statement the actor said he and the mother had a "fleeting affair" and the pregnancy was "not planned" but he "could not be happier or more supportive".
Commenting on the criticism he received in newspapers over this wording, Grant
said: "I didn't want to appear a monster who ran away from my girlfriend.
"It's true I've been given a hard time for using those words, which is ironic seeing as it is actually the truth, but that doesn't seem to be very popular."