Adult site Free4Internet.net didn’t know the glamour model in its ad looked like the girl next door, but breathed a sigh of relief when the ensuing libel claim was thrown out.
Topic: Libel
Who: Kerry O’Shea, Who: Kerry O’Shea, MGN Ltd and Free4Internet.net Ltd
Where: Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court, London
When: May 2001
What happened:
An ad in the Sunday Mirror promoted an adult website and featured a photograph of a glamour model holding a telephone, inviting readers to access the site to see more pictures of her. By pure coincidence the model looked so much like the claimant, Kerry O’Shea, (who was certainly not the glamour model pictured) that Kerry’s family and a family friend thought she was following a new career in porn. Kerry sued for libel and malicious falsehood, but the Court threw the claim out.
On the malicious falsehood claim, Morland J said this might have been committed if MGN could be proved to have deliberately used a lookalike picture, but this was not the case here. On libel the Judge took into account the "freedom of expression" Article 10 of the European Human Rights Convention in finding for the Sunday Mirror. He said it would impose an intolerable burden on advertisers and publishers if, before publishing any image of a person which might in context be seen as degrading and defamatory, they had to run checks to ensure that the person depicted did not resemble someone else.
Why this matters:
The judge’s reasoning shows that he was thinking mainly of journalistic freedoms when considering whether to hold in favour of Ms O’Shea would be an unjustified interference with freedom of expression. So it is not crystal clear that advertisers no longer need to worry that a fictitious name of an unsavoury person in an ad might be that of a real person. Advice should betaken in each case. However, the judgment is undoubtedly sensible and a potential source of relief for unlucky advertisers!
