The Threat Of Libel Action
Saturday, February 4th, 2006With the furore surrounding Sol Campbell and his obvious personal problems which became apparent after his dismal first half performance for Arsenal against West Ham this week, there has been a glut of eager rumour mongers bombarding football websites, blogs and forums as well as the gossip columns with their own half baked explanations for Campbell’s troubles. While it may be the current football scandal on everyone’s lips or fingertips it raises serious questions as to who should become liable to prosecution if blatant lies or unfounded opinions are written concerning someone with as high a professional profile as an England international footballer.
As the messageboards rush to delete any such rumours on their forums and threaten the people responsible with bans, it becomes a muddled grey area when the definitive responsibility for accepting blame for the accusations is to be decided. British football is no stranger to libel cases involving players, managers and chairmen and there are more than a few amateur webmasters who are very concerned about finding themselves in the dock because of an offhand malicious comment from one of their website’s visitors.
Traditionally it has been the print media which has allowed itself to get into deep water with allowing allegations and insinuations about certain football people, mostly with the simple intention of gaining some notoriety and selling some newspapers. While it is often the red tops such as The Sun, Daily Mirror and Daily Star which have these types of cases brought against them, a local North London paper, the Highbury and Islington Express, found itself being sued for libel in the High Court in London in 2000 following an inyterview it had printed with a former schoolmate of ex-Arsenal star Charlie George. In the interview scriptwriter Lawrence Marks made the claim that if Mr George, who went to the same secondary school as he did, had not been such a talented footballer, he would have “ended up in prison”.
As George’s family, friends and himself all still lived in the Islington area, he took great offence at being drawn into Marks’ illustration of the area they had grown up in and resented the implication that he may have had criminal tendencies. As a result of the original piece Charlie George had lost invitations to speak at several footballing award dinners and decided to take the newspaper to court to reclaim his good name. The newspaper subsequently apologised and made it clear that it had no intention to cast any aspersion on Mr George’s reputation or character as an adult and paid him damages and covered his legal costs.
On a larger scale, the News of the World, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International, was taken and forced to pay substantial undisclosed libel damages in July 2005 to Northern Ireland star Keith Gillespie after an article in March 2004 had alleged that he and two teammates had raped one woman, attempted to rape another and tried to intimidate a third into not telling the police about an incident that was supposed to have happened at a Leicester City training camp in La Manga, Spain in February 2004.
Gillespie was released on bail in March 2004 and the criminal proceedings were dropped in May. The women’s appeal was finally dismissed in December and the allegations described as “entirely untrue”. Keith Gillespie also was awarded damages from the Daily Star in July 2005 for an article alleging that he slept with prostitutes that they had printed while the winger was jailed without bail in Spain at the time of the rape allegations. Once again the British gutter press was willing to throw a innocent man’s reputation into the gutter in order to increase their own tawdry circulation.
While players are the main newspaper sellers when it comes to scurrilous rumours, there is nothing to stop footbal chairmen getting an unfair coverage either in the press as Southampton chairman Rupert Lowe’s High Court libel case against The Times newspaper in late 2005 shows. Lowe had objected to claims by The Times chief football writer Martin Samuel that he had behaved “shabbily” in suspending former manager Dave Jones over child abuse allegations in January 2000. Jones had been subsequently cleared of any wrongdoing in the case and went on to manage other clubs including Cardiff City while The Times were forced to pay Mr. Lowe over ?250,000 in libel damages.
Lowe had sued the Times over an August 2004 column by Samuel at the height of the sex scandal at the Football Association during which Lowe had advocated fundamental reforms in how the FA was run. The article about the FA, headed Men who would be kings are a ghastly alternative, referred to Mr Lowe as a “chairman whose idea of crisis management was to remove his manager over a court case that collapsed within 24 hours”. It went on to ask: “How would Lowe approach the issue of an England player accused of breaking the law, when he so shabbily handled the case of David Jones, his manager?”
During the hearing, Mr Lowe told the court he felt the article was a “real blot” on his character and that in deciding to sue he had a duty to “the whole Southampton family”, including shareholders, supporters, its football academy and sponsors. “The article was factually incorrect and I felt the way it had been written put a particularly nasty slant on myself as a person,” he told the court. Martin Samuel, who is also chief sports writer for the News of the World, said in evidence that the article represented his “honestly held opinion”. The court were unconvinced and found in Rupert Lowe’s favour.
Such cases illustrate the problems the media and those who write for it have in staying between the lines of what they believe to be the truth and what is actually the truth. As Martin Samuel found out in the Rupert Lowe case, having an opinion on the matter holds no sway with the courts when a plaintiff feels they have been the victim of a particular slur. While it is unlikely that any small, independent website would be censured for printing the opinions of any of their members in this latest particular case is another matter but it is hardly one to risk when the damages given out by the British courts are rightly so severe.
