On a recent Saturday, reporters from a British newspaper huddled around a television set tuned to a soccer match, straining to hear.
They were not listening for the announcers, or even the score. Instead, as one of the journalists recounted, they were listening to the chanting crowd, hoping it would sing en masse about the extramarital affair of one of the players on the field.
The reporters knew that the player, married and among Britain’s most famous, had had an affair with a television personality. But the player has taken out a so-called super injunction — a stringent British legal measure that prevents newspapers from publishing a story on the topic, or even from making any mention that a court order has been granted.
The injunctions, intended to protect privacy, have become a scandal here in Britain. The BBC political editor Andrew Marr, who often grills Britain’s most prominent politicians on the Sunday show that bears his name, publicly admitted Tuesday that he, too, had used one to hide an affair.
And in recent weeks, the issue of the soccer player’s identity has become a matter of national debate, splashed across front pages and featured on television shows. Super injunctions have also been raised in the Houses of Parliament as an example of a curb on the freedom of the press by activist judges.
But in a world where millions converse on Facebook, Twitter and the like, the law cannot feasibly be enforced online. So the reporters listening to the soccer game were hoping that the boisterous fans of the rival team would have read about the affair on the Internet and then shout or sing the details to ridicule their opponents, providing a circuitous way of covering the story. But they were disappointed.
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Britain’s press laws are widely seen as particularly restrictive, so much so that international celebrities and public figures often choose to pursue their libel suits here, in what is frequently referred to as “libel tourism.”
But the super injunctions offer a way of stopping stories before they come out and are frequently served on multiple newspapers to pre-empt any possible publication, said Charlotte Harris, a media lawyer who has represented public figures seeking injunctions and others arguing against them.
The injunctions are so protective of their subjects that only a few cases have been made public: another soccer player, John Terry, the captain of the English team, who was reported to have had an affair with the ex-girlfriend of a teammate; Fred Goodwin, the former chairman of the $40-billion banking group Royal Bank of Scotland, who faced criticism for his lavish payouts; and Trafigura, a multinational commodities company accused of dumping toxic waste in Africa.
Details of other cases may become well known within the media community, and rumors from other sources may even spread online, but once a super injunction is served news organisations must keep their readers in the dark. The injunctions take “a matter of hours” in private meetings between judges and lawyers, said Harris, the media lawyer. And though their secretive nature makes it hard to verify a precise number, reports in the British press suggest that as many as 30 super injunctions may have been granted to other prominent figures.
“The rich and powerful,” said Ian Hislop, the editor of the magazine Private Eye, a satirical weekly that often reports on the hypocrisies of Britain’s elite, “are increasingly turning to these orders.”
“They used at least to have to argue that something you’d printed was not true,” Hislop said referring to Britain’s strong libel laws, widely held to favor those bringing claims. “Now it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. They can suppress it with a super injunction and call it privacy.”
Private Eye had mounted a legal challenge to Marr’s super injunction last week, days before he admitted to the court order. Through a BBC spokesman, Marr declined to comment.
But speaking of his injunction, granted in 2008, he told the Daily Mail that he “did not come into journalism to go around gagging journalists. Am I embarrassed by it? Yes. Am I uneasy about it? Yes. But at the time there was a crisis in my marriage,” he said, adding that he was also concerned about protecting the young child of the woman with whom he had had the affair.
©2011 The New York
Times News Service