A protester splattered Rupert Murdoch with white foam during the parliamentary hearing. Audience members were shocked by the incident, and some expressed sympathy for the media tycoon.

Wendi Deng lunges towards a man trying to attack her husband, News Corp Chief Executive and Chairman Rupert Murdoch, during a parliamentary committee hearing on phone hacking at Portcullis House in London July 19, 2011.

David Cathcart, a university lecturer, said, "I saw a shabbily dressed man come from behind me, two rows behind me, walk around the edge of the seating straight towards where Mr Murdoch was sitting, with a blue plastic bag in his hand. And he fished out what turns out to have been a paper plate with some foam on it and he pushed it towards Mr Murdoch. At that stage there were people flying everywhere and I didn't see anything, you know, I didn't see what sort of impact there was. But Mr Murdoch was fine very quickly afterwards."

Shows a man (Top L) hitting News Corporation Chief Rupert Murdoch (2nd Row Seated L) in the face with a plate of foam as he and son James (2nd Row Seated R) give evidence to a Parliamentary Select Committee on the phone hacking scandal.

Lily Argent, a student, said, "He looked...it was almost horrible, he's such a powerful man but he's so frail. You could see that in his questioning, he was really slow to answer the questions, he was only giving a few words, really, on those questions. And he was... He looked really old, and he'd hit him quite hard in the face and you could see almost like it hurt him, which, you know... he's such a powerful man and so many people are scared of him but in that moment he looked just like an old man. It wasn't very nice to see."