In the days after the June 2009 wedding party that took place at the 284-acre Sarsden estate, 75 miles northwest of London in the Oxfordshire countryside, it would be noted by the British press how remarkable it was, considering who the guests were, that the bride had managed to keep the event a secret from the media. There were no tabloid journalists hanging around the nearby village of Churchill, no paparazzi hiding in the bushes on the morning of June 13, the day Rebekah Wade, the editor of The Sun, Britain’s largest daily newspaper, celebrated her marriage to the former racehorse trainer and “international playboy” Charles Patrick Evelyn Brooks.

The prime minister, Gordon Brown, and his wife, Sarah, attended, as did David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader and prime minister–to–be, and his wife, Samantha. Rupert Murdoch, *The Sun’*s owner, had flown in. Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth and her husband, the P.R. man Matthew Freud, who had helped to orchestrate the “media blackout,” had driven over from Burford Priory, their $7 million, 22-bedroom country home, 15 miles away. The guest list attested to the power Rebekah Wade had achieved, at the age of just 41, as the editor of The Sun, a tabloid with three million readers, and as the first woman to hold that job. But it also attested to her charm, “her warmth,” her “gregariousness,” and “her straightforward, sympathetic manner,” because the guests were also close friends. Sarah Brown had her for “sleepovers” at Chequers, the prime minister’s country retreat. David Cameron was so close he reportedly signed his letters to her “Love, David.”

That the media blackout had been so successful was even more surprising, considering that, by 2009, Wade had become something of a celebrity herself, with her first husband, Ross Kemp, a star of the hugely popular soap opera EastEnders, and then with Charlie Brooks. Endlessly written about and photographed—at Ascot, sitting in the royal box at Wimbledon, helicoptering to the Glastonbury Festival—she was instantly recognizable with her pile of red ringleted hair. In the competitive, ruthless, often cruel, and largely male culture of the British tabloids, Wade stood out. She spoke French, and had attended the Sorbonne; she and Charlie Brooks were at the center of the social scene in Chipping Norton—the weekend hub of the wealthy and powerful in Oxfordshire.

The wedding party at Sarsden’s lake—where, according to a friend, Brooks’s father had proposed to his mother—was, as one guest recalls, “incredibly romantic and lavish.” It was “all very Disney-esque, where everything looks right.” And at the time, everything was going right for Rebekah Wade—now Rebekah Brooks. In just 20 years she had gone from being a secretary at one of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers to running his Sunday tabloid, the News of the World, at the age of 31, to running The Sun at 34. Her ambition had been described by the British media as “terrifying” and “phosphorescent,” but in her ascent up the ladder, it seemed she had never put a foot wrong. And just 10 days after her wedding party, she would climb even higher, when, on June 23, she was promoted to C.E.O. of News International, Murdoch’s newspaper empire in the U.K., which would make her one of the most powerful women in Britain.

As the 200 guests sipped champagne by the lake that day, few could imagine how fast Rebekah Brooks would fall. On July 15, 2011, two years after she became C.E.O., Brooks resigned. Two days later she was arrested “in connection with allegations of corruption and phone hacking” and interrogated by Scotland Yard detectives for nine hours before she was released on bail. Almost overnight—ever since it was revealed in early July that employees of the News of the World had hacked into the cell phone of Milly Dowler, a missing 13-year-old who was found murdered in 2002—Rebekah Brooks seemed to have become the most reviled woman in Britain, the woman at the center of what had begun as a phone-hacking scandal but has spread to include allegations of bribes to police, e-mail hacking, surveillance by private detectives of politicians and lawyers, and questions about a massive cover-up at News International. No charges have been filed against Brooks, and there have been no specific allegations of criminal wrongdoing against her, but the intensity of the anger toward Brooks has been accompanied by a growing number of questions as the judicial and parliamentary investigations have expanded and the extent of her influence has slowly emerged.