Archive for libel
A Tory parliamentary candidate who bombarded his Liberal Democrat rival with hate mail and vandalised the party’s Watford headquarters was facing jail today after admitting more than 70 offences of criminal damage and harassment. Ian Oakley, 31, of West Drayton, northwest London, admitted mounting a two-year hate campaign against Sal Brinton, who he considered his main rival to defeat the sitting Labour MP.
Oakley admitted making silent phone calls to her home and sending lesbian magazines and letters addressed to The candidate, who resigned from the Conservative Party after his activities were discovered, also slashed tyres and wrecked shutters at the ...
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Ex-England and Manchester United striker Andrew Cole today accepted a formal apology and substantial damages at London’s High Court after the Daily Star branded him a “wife-beater”.
Cole, who recently signed for League One side Nottingham Forest, sued the paper’s publisher Express Newspapers over the 26 February article headlined Footie Cole is ˜wife beater”, published the day after Cole was arrested by Cheshire Police on suspicion of assault following an incident at a house in Alderley Edge.
Cole’s solicitor, Rachel Atkins, told judge Mr Justice David Eady today that Cole had been released on bail on 26 February, and that all charges ...
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Robert Murat, the British expatriate property consultant libelled in more than 100 articles in the British tabloid press over the disappearance in May last year of Madeleine McCann from Praia da Luz, the Portuguese resort where he lived, accepted more than £600,000 in damages from 11 national newspapers yesterday.
At a hearing in the high court lasting less than seven minutes, the media organisations (the Daily and Sunday Express and Daily Star from Express Newspapers; the Daily Mail, Evening Standard, and Metro of Associated Newspapers; the Daily and Sunday Mirror and the Scottish Daily Record of the MGN group; and News ...
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The home secretary, David Blunkett, has agreed to pay compensation to Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie, the former nursery nurses who won a libel case after being falsely accused of child abuse. Mr Blunkett has exonerated the pair of criminal charges based on facts arising from a case in the civil courts. Lawyers have also pointed out that the decision to accept the pair’s claim has been reached, for the Home Office, with exceptional speed. Ms Reed, 31, and Mr Lillie, 38, were originally charged with child abuse at Shieldfield nursery in central Newcastle in 1993, but were acquitted the ...
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The people’s verdict has been given . . . and the vast majority of you believe we are right to demand taxpayers’ money back from the team responsible for a discredited report. The four authors of Abuse in the Early Years were paid more than £360,000 for the report even though it contained “fundamental claims which they must have known to be untrue”, according to High Court judge Mr Justice Eady….Susan Griffiths, of Wrexham in North Wales, said: ….
IC Newcastle
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Council leader Tony Flynn has refused to quit over Newcastle’s handling of the Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie nursery abuse allegations.The council faces a £5 million legal bill after the former nursery workers won a libel action over the false accusations earlier this year.Last night, at a heated meeting at Newcastle Civic Centre, councillors were presented with a report into the catalogue of mistakes made by the council in handling the alleged abuse claims.
IC Newcastle
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A North-East council has admitted to a catalogue of mistakes over the way a review team was set up to investigate allegations of abuse at a nursery. Former nursery workers Dawn Reed, 31, and Christopher Lillie, 37, won their libel battle in July against false accusations that they had abused children in their care. Newcastle City Council is now facing a £5 million bill after they commissioned a report which made the unfounded allegations. Summing up after the five-month High Court trial which ended in July, Mr Justice Eady said the workers “merited an award at the highest permitted level” ...
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Newcastle City Council will have to pay £25,000 in legal costs for the assessment of whether to appeal against the decision in a libel action.The sum was revealed in answer to a written question at a public meeting of the council last night.
IC Newcastle
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Former nursery boss Joyce Eyeington today broke nearly a decade of silence over the Tyneside child abuse scandal and told how it wrecked her life. Read this disturbing account in which Ms Etherington says “… as soon as the inquiry escalated and the police were involved it became very difficult to express disbelief. It was not a popular stance.”
IC Newcastle
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“This case isnt about me, it is about all the trauma that so many families have been through over so many years,” says Richard Barker. His story begins about ten years ago when Newcastle city council dismissed nursery nurses Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie after allegations of child abuse at their nursery in Shieldfield. The pair were subsequently acquitted at a criminal trial. But after more complaints, Barker, who was running a child-protection course at Northumbria University at the time, was invited to lead a review team to look into child safety in the region and to investigate the general ...
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The extent to which outside agencies became involved in Shieldfield was highlighted by the consultant paediatrician much criticised during the libel trial, Dr Camille San Lazaro, who in her letter to the editor of the journal, Child Abuse Review, Vol 3, 1994, expounded the need for a specialised approach to day care multiple abuse incidents. She described the parents’ immediate demand for services from up to 30 organisations in the Newcastle area, including general practitioners, casualty departments, school doctors, health visitors, Childline, Incest Line, Rape Crisis, the NSPCC, Barnardos, community psychiatric nurses and the clergy. Were all these people and ...
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Campaigners are calling on the doctor at the centre of a child abuse controversy to hand back her OBE. Action Against False Allegations of Abuse is demanding that Camille San Lazaro return the gong she was given in 1999 for “services in the care of sexually abused children”.
IC Newcastle
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The decision by the High Court to award libel damages to two nursery workers in Newcastle over allegations of child abuse raises searching questions about how such abuse cases should be dealt with in future by the judicial system….
Guardian
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New guidance on the conduct of local authority inquiries will aim to prevent a repeat of the libel action brought by two nursery nurses falsely accused of sexually abusing children in a Newcastle city council report. A consultation paper drawn up by the Law Commission recommends extending statutory qualified privilege, which protects reports discussed in public council meetings from libel claims, to any local authority inquiry report as long as the proceedings and the publication are both fair.
Note: FACT North Wales submitted a paper to the Law Commission as part of the consultation excercise.
Guardian
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Dawn Reed
Christopher Lillie
Mr Justice Eady
Newcastle City Council
Richard Barker
Judith Jones
Jacqui Saradjian
Roy Wardel
Court Service
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Newcastle City Council claim they acted properly in publishing Independent Inquiry Report…The Council is pleased that Mr Justice Eady has upheld the Council’s defence of qualified privilege, which means he has confirmed that the Council acted properly in publishing the Independent Review Team’s report. We suspect, however, that many of the parents and families who have been affected by this long-running matter will struggle to understand this judgment and will be upset by the outcome of this very unusual case. As the Council’s defence was successful in this action, it will not be appropriate for us to appeal against this ...
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A Liverpool man was awarded £350,000 damages against the News of the World for false allegations that he was a paedophile
Guardian
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