Sometime in the mid-1990s, as we were waiting to go on air in a TV green room, Uri Geller approached me. His first words: “If you tell lies about me in your magazine, I will sue you for a million pounds.”
A production assistant arrived. “How are we doing?”
Geller: “Oh, we’re just having a friendly conversation.”
Me: !!!
For many years, every new journalist in the United Kingdom was immediately taught about the terror of English libel law. For two main reasons: every libel case was fantastically expensive, and the burden of proof was reversed. Under the defamation law of 1996, a libel claim required three things: the content at issue had to be fact, not opinion; the statement must have identified or referred to the plaintiff; and the statement had to be published. Under this law, the cardiologist Peter Wilmshurst was sued multiple times over journal papers critiquing cardiac treatments.
How expensive? David Irving’s 1996–2001 suit against Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin, over comments in her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust is estimated to have cost between £1 million and £2 million. Irving, who as the loser was liable to pay both sides’ costs, declared bankruptcy in 2002. Because the law was so favorable to plaintiffs, England became a target for forum-shopping.
The 1996 law was in effect in 2008, when the British Chiropractic (BCA) Association sued Simon Singh. In the original trial, the judge, Mr. Justice David Eady ruled that the Singh comment at issue was one of fact, not opinion, which would have meant Singh’s only route to winning the case would have been to prove it was true. Singh dissented and appealed, and a panel of three judges overturned the judgment with as strong a statement of the public interest in scientific commentary as one could wish. The BCA withdrew. Singh turned over the donations he’d received to pay his legal bills to a campaign to reform libel law, led by Sense About Science, Index on Censorship, and English PEN.
The campaign was successful. The Defamation Act 2013 requires the claimant to show they’ve been harmed or are likely to be harmed, set a one-year time limitation, and added a public interest defense (perfect for Singh). So: yay?
Not so fast. We are now seeing the rise of “SLAPP” defamation
suits. SLAPP, which stands for strategic lawsuits against
public participation, began as a U.S. term for lawsuits
launched to chill environmental protests. (CSI &
Skeptical Inquirer
successfully fought off a couple such suits themselves over
the years.) In today’s England, they’re being used to
chill investigative journalists. Examples follow.
California-based Forensic News, its founder U.S. journalist Scott Stedman, and three more of its reporting journalists are awaiting trial in London in a case brought by British-Israeli security consultant Walter Soriano. The complaint relates to six articles published between 2019 and 2020 after it was reported that the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee was seeking to interview Soriano. Fifteen organizations have issued a statement supporting Stedman, noting that Soriano has brought similar suits against investigative journalists in France and Israel, as well as Twitter in Ireland.
Orwell Prize–winning British journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who, writing for the Guardian, exposed the activities of Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 EU referendum, awaits a decision in a defamation case brought by multimillionaire Brexit campaign backer Arron Banks over two comments, one in a Ted talk and the other in a tweet. Banks is risking little, but a loss could bankrupt Cadwalladr. Like Stedman, she has set up a GoFundMe to cope with her legal bills. *
At Byline Times, Manasa Narayanan and Daisy Steinhardt list two more: Tom Burgis and Catherine Belton.
Burgis, a journalist at the Financial Times and author of the 2020 book Kleptopia, reports on autocratic states’ use of Britain to safeguard their wealth. Burgis faced two suits, one joint with his publisher, HarperCollins, and one jointly with the newspaper, both brought by the Kazakh mining company Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC). Narayanan and Steinhardt note that ENRC has launched eighteen legal proceedings against journalists, lawyers, and other critics—including the United Kingdom’s Serious Fraud Office—since 2013. On March 2, the High Court dismissed ENRC’s complaint awarded Burgis £50,000 in costs.
Belton, with her publisher, also HarperCollins, faced complaints by a state-owned oil company and three Russian billionaires, including Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramowich, over sections of her 2020 book, Putin’s People. That case has been settled—but it was expected to cost as much as £10 million had it gone to trial.
In another case, highlighted by Open Democracy, the Evening Standard newspaper had to spend two years to get a judge’s order of anonymity overturned for an Azerbaijiani couple who had been forced to forfeit £4 million to the National Crime Agency.
Finally, in February the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, John Micklethwait, warned that the U.K. Supreme Court was assuring the protection of the power by finding in favor of “ZKC,” a senior executive at a formerly UK-listed company who objected on privacy grounds to Bloomberg’s reporting that he was under criminal investigation. Bloomberg was required to pay £25,000 in compensation and many times that in legal costs. With little new legislation, he concluded, “London has already become the libel capital of the world.”
At the Press Gazette, lawyer Caroline Kean, who defended both Sturgis and Belton in court, writes that the public interest defense has been weaponized as a personal attack on the journalist, not the object of investigation. In addition, data protection law is being cited to extend the time limitation. The point is to deter anyone from writing anything further.
Prime minister Boris Johnson has promised to crack down on “lawfare” by amending defamation law to strengthen the public interest defense and perhaps by capping the costs claimants can recover or introducing a requirement for claimants to prove “actual malice” by the defendant.
None of this will come soon enough to help the present defendants.
*In a decision handed down on June 13, 2022, Carole Cadwalladr won the libel action brought against her by Arron Banks.
*Tom Burgis has now won his suit: https://twitter.com/BBCDomC/status/1499047525898149891