| Jack_ |
10-03-2017 03:01 PM |
Katie Hopkins loses libel case to Jack Monroe
Quote:
Jack Monroe wins Twitter libel case against Katie Hopkins
Food writer and campaigner wins £24,000 from Mail Online columnist in row over tweets about damage to war memorial
The food writer and campaigner Jack Monroe has won £24,000 in a libel case against Katie Hopkins, in a row over tweets which implied Monroe defaced or condoned the damage of a war memorial.
Monroe, who sued the controversial Mail Online columnist over the posts from May 2015, told the high court in London that the messages from Hopkins had led to death threats, and said their legal dispute had been an “unproductive, devastating nightmare”. The food blogger’s lawyers argued the tweets were defamatory and caused “serious harm” to Monroe’s reputation.
Speaking after the decision was announced, Monroe said: “I am very relieved that it is over and done with. It has been a very long and very arduous process. There have been many times when I have almost given up and walked away. But I started something and I had to see it through, and I have done.”
Monroe’s lawyer, Mark Lewis, a partner at Seddons solicitors, said the blogger had “finally been vindicated in full from the libellous and wholly false accusation by Katie Hopkins that [Monroe] had supported the vandalisation of a war memorial. Jack Monroe never did and, coming from a proud military family, never would.”
Of Hopkins, he said that rather than immediately apologising for her error, “the self-styled ‘rent-a-gob’ defiantly posted another defamatory tweet” and had gone on to conduct her legal defence “by slinging as much mud as she could to hide the fact that she had made this false allegation”.
“Hopkins claimed that Twitter was just the wild west where anything goes,” Lewis said. “The judge has shown that there is no such thing as a Twitter outlaw … and the price of not saying sorry has been very high.”
The case centred on public tweets sent by Hopkins to Monroe – apparently in a case of mistaken identity – after a memorial to the women of the second world war in Whitehall was vandalised with the words “**** Tory scum” during an anti-austerity demonstration.
Commenting on the graffiti, Laurie Penny, a columnist for the New Statesman, tweeted from her account @PennyRed that she “[didn’t] have a problem” with the vandalism as a form of protest, as “the bravery of past generations does not oblige us to be cowed today”.
Shortly afterwards, in a tweet directed to Monroe’s then account @MsJackMonroe, Hopkins wrote: “Scrawled on any memorials recently? Vandalised the memory of those who fought for your freedom. Grandma got any more medals?”
The court was told that Hopkins had mistaken Monroe for Penny. Both writers have been outspoken anti-austerity critics.
Shortly after Hopkins’s original message, Monroe, a contributor to the Guardian, tweeted in response: “I have NEVER ‘scrawled on a memorial’. Brother in the RAF. Dad was a Para in the Falklands. You’re a piece of ****.”
Monroe later sent a second message asking Hopkins to apologise: “Dear @KTHopkins, public apology + £5K to migrant rescue and I won’t sue. It’ll be cheaper for you and v satisfying for me.”
Hopkins deleted the first tweet but shortly afterwards tweeted: “Can someone explain to me – in 10 words or less – the difference between irritant @PennyRed and social anthrax @MsJackMonroe.”
Jonathan Price, for Hopkins, told the judge that the columnist’s case was that “this relatively trivial dispute arose and was resolved on Twitter in a period of several hours”. He argued that “no lasting harm, and certainly no serious harm”, to Monroe’s reputation resulted from it.
Monroe came to prominence through a blog, A Girl Called Jack, which shared affordable recipes the writer had devised as a single parent.
In December, Mail Online was ordered to pay £150,000 to a British Muslim family over a column by Hopkins which falsely accused them of extremism after they were stopped by US immigration officials en route to Disneyland. The website published an apology.
Hopkins, who first found fame as a contestant on The Apprentice, left the Sun in 2015 after writing a column that compared migrants to cockroaches and becoming the target of a petition calling for her to be sacked.
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The Guardian
Will the human troll learn her lesson? Probably not. But at least her faux bile she spouts under the guise of 'free speech' has cost her.
Rinse the bitch! :cheer2: |
