United Kingdom: CFWIJ Stands With Carole Cadwalladr As She Faces SLAPP Trial

/

January 17, 2022, London- The Observer and Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr is being sued by a millionaire businessman and co-founder of the 2016 Brexit campaign Leave. EU, Arron Banks. He brought a defamation action against Carole over two instances, one in a Ted Talk and one in a tweet, where she said Banks was lying about his relationship with Russia. The Coalition For Women In Journalism is concerned for the journalists facing a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) that are aimed to silence them from speaking out on issues of public interest.

Initially, Banks filed four claims against Carole Cadwalladr 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”.

On Friday was the first day of the trial at the high court in central London where Gavin Millar QC, representing Carole, said “What my client said, she was legally entitled to say as part of a discussion about matters of the highest public interest.”

Those matters were listed as campaign finance, foreign money and the use of social media messaging and personal data in the context of the EU referendum, the Guardian reported.

According to Millar, the claim against Carole personally was an “attempt to stymie her investigative journalism about him and make other investigative journalists wary about pursuing theirs”.

Cadwalladr has won a series of prestigious journalism prizes for her work published in the Guardian and Observer exposing the Cambridge Analytica data-harvesting scandal and spending by pro-Brexit campaigners in the EU referendum.

In his written witness statement, Banks said Cadwalladr’s remarks had given an impression that he was “a traitor to this country and to the democratic process. That crosses the line.” 

Carole called the first day of the trial as “the weirdest”. “I cannot tell you how much I did not want to fight this case. How much I did not want to be in court today. All I can say is that when the chips are down, people come through,” she wrote in a twitter post.

In 2019, the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, and the Observer editor, Paul Webster, said: “Carole’s brave reporting has made waves around the world, and given the public much more insight into the secretive ways some powerful people and organisations have sought to influence our democracies.

“This case is a very worrying example of a wealthy person singling out an individual journalist and using the law to stifle legitimate debate and silence public interest journalism.”

The Coalition For Women In Journalism stands in solidarity with journalists facing SLAPPs. We are alarmed with the increasing number of attacks against them. These cases are being used to financially exhaust journalists and push them into dropping investigative stories.

Carole’s trial will be closely followed by representatives of press freedom organisations which openly supported the journalist.