United Kingdom: Journalist Carole Cadwalladr Awaits Decision On SLAPP Case Against Her

Location: United Kingdom, London
Date: January 24, 2022

Carole Cadwalladr coming out of court with her QC Gavin Millar. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

The judge reserved the judgement on the defamation case against award-winning journalist Carole Cadawalladr as her five-day trial concluded on January 21, 2022. Carole, who is associated with The Guardian and The Observer, awaits the court’s decision on the lawsuit filed against her by a multimillionaire Arron Banks. The libel charges against the journalist are based on a comment she made during a TED talk regarding Arron's association with Nigel Farage and his Brexit campaign, as well as a subsequent tweet.  

CFWIJ urges the London High Court to give its decision taking into account press freedom and freedom of speech. We condemn the attempt to intimidate the senior journalist through the use of strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP).

Carole, who has won a series of prestigious prizes for her reportage, stood trial for the SLAPP brought against her on the basis of a 15-minute video from 2019, still available on TED platforms, in which she made a passing remark regarding Banks’s donation to the Brexit campaign. While speaking about the impact of Facebook (now Meta) on the electoral process, Carole stated that the £8 million donation made by Banks to Farage's Brexit campaign in 2016 breached electoral and data laws. In a subsequent tweet, she also asserted that Banks has not been entirely truthful about his relationship with the Russian government in the past. The journalist maintains that the statement was made in public interest.

Banks, who has persistently denied any association with the Russian government, was released of charges of illegality regarding his donations soon after the publication of the video. He then went on to sue Carole, claiming her remarks were defamatory. The case has been ongoing for two years and if found in breach of libel laws, Carole is looking at potentially being made to pay £750,000 to £1m in damages to Banks. Carole maintains that she has always made it clear that the ties between Banks and Russia were never legally proven.

Initially, Banks filed four claims against Carole in July 2019, two of which he dropped in January 2020, after the judge found them to be “far-fetched and divorced from the specific context in which those words were used”.

In closing written submissions on January 21, 2022, Carole’s counsel Gavin Millar submitted that Banks and his close associate Andy Wigmore, director of communications for Leave.EU, had given “contradictory and misleading accounts about his [Banks’s] meetings with Russian officials and the extent of his relationship with the Russian state,” reported The Guardian. 

He said that the Ted Talk was “unquestionably speech which addressed matters of the greatest possible importance to the organisation of the political life of the country”. 

According to Millar, the meaning of Carole’s words, which are the subject of the lawsuit, was determined by a judge to be that Banks lied about a secret relationship with the Russian government “in relation to acceptance of foreign funding of electoral campaigns in breach of the law on such funding”. 

Carole has said she did not intend to imply that Banks had received Russian money, nor lied about receiving Russian money, only about the extent of his contacts with Russia.

Meanwhile, William McCormick QC for Banks, reiterated his argument that Banks had suffered reputational damage, stressing that the Ted Talk had been viewed by a “new audience who were not likely (or less likely) to have heard about the allegations against C (the claimant)”.

The Guardian reported that McCormick accused Cadwalladr of having “failed to exercise proper journalistic standards”. 

Banks's decision to sue a freelance journalist and employ a SLAPP instead of TED platforms, where the Carole lecture remains published, is not lost on the larger public. This move, thus, feels like a multimillionaire's attempt to financially cripple a journalist in order to discourage the press from speaking about him. This will not be the first time libel laws have been weaponized against journalists to intimidate them into silence.

The Coalition For Women In Journalism is extremely concerned about the case against Carole Cadwalladr and has closely followed the proceedings. We urge the London High Court to quash Banks’s charges against the journalist. This is an instance where the legal system is being misused to legally harass and silence a journalist. The repercussions of a judgement in Banks's favour and the precedent it will set can have extremely damaging effects on press freedom in the United Kingdom going forward.

The Coalition For Women In Journalism is a global organization of support for women journalists. The CFWIJ pioneered mentorship for mid-career women journalists across several countries around the world and is the first organization to focus on the status of free press for women journalists. We thoroughly document cases of any form of abuse against women in any part of the globe. Our system of individuals and organizations brings together the experience and mentorship necessary to help female career journalists navigate the industry. Our goal is to help develop a strong mechanism where women journalists can work safely and thrive.

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