Cases

Thornton v Telegraph Media Group Ltd

Held

The defence should be struck out. The words in the first sentence about C’s giving her interviewees the right to “read what she says about them and alter it” might be regarded by a jury without perversity as being the reviewer’s expression of opinion about C’s methodology. However, the defence was bound to fail because the passage contained a clear and material misstatement of fact: C had not given her interviewees any such right, and the review significantly misdescribed what C had said in the Acknowledgments section of the book in this regard. In these circumstances, notwithstanding D’s reliance on other passages of the book as arguably supporting the comment, there was no realistic possibility of s.6 of the Defamation Act 1952 availing.

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