Walliams case highlights using law to prevent publication

The great American press baron William Randolph Hearst is often credited with saying news was something somebody, somewhere did not want to see in print. Everything else, he said, was advertising.

David Walliams did not want to see reporting on his alleged encounters with 30 young women in print and on TV. The material met Hearst's definition of news.

But Mr Walliams, a phenomenally successful childrens author, comedian and TV personality, had enough money to hire some top-end London lawyers to try and stop publication by the Guardian and ITN.

And those lawyers acting on instructions from David Walliams were able to prevent publication for six months.

The Walliams case, though lawyers say it's technically not a SLAPP (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation), has rekindled debate about using the law to stop the public finding things out.

Because it's not just journalists and media organisations that are subject to SLAPP actions. Whistleblowers, politicians, NGOs, campaign groups and regular individuals speaking out have all been subject to SLAPPs. And not just in Britain, but right across Europe.

Arriving the day after Russell Brand's sentencing for rape and sexual assault, and playing out in the public realm shaped by the Epstein files, Harvey Weinstein, the Me-Too movement, Donald Trump and E Jean Carroll, Stormy Daniels et al, we are probably living through a turning point in Western mores.

A time of change when things that the rich and powerful used to be able to get away with are no longer tacitly accepted, and so they cannot get away with them any longer.

The courts are part of that change. So are the police. The Metropolitan Police said yesterday that they have opened an investigation into "allegations of serious sexual offences" against David Walliams.

The legal knots Mr Walliams tried to tie the Guardian and ITN up in will re-emerge in other forms, as high end law firms are hired to try novel ways to limit the public awareness of celebrities and businesses to the advertising and PR, not the newsworthy stuff, as per Hearst’s definition.

The novel argument in the Walliams case was to invoke the European Convention on Human Rights, notably the right to life, as grounds to prevent publication of the Guardian and ITN investigation.

The media organisations had spent three years gathering material, and had high confidence in their reporting. In May, they presented their findings to Mr Walliams and sought his comment.

He denied the allegations in the reporting, but he also sued in court to prevent publication. And he was able to use anonymity rules to prevent publication of the fact that he was taking such action.

Thus the case was listed as PPT v Independent Television News and Another KB-2026-003646, and nobody was allowed to report it - until last week, when Mr Walliams lost the case - though even then he could not be named pending time allowed for an appeal to be lodged.

It was only when that time expired, at close of business on Monday, that the Guardian and ITN could name David Walliams as the personality who had sought the injunction and published their stories, though speculation about him had swirled on social media for weeks in advance of the ruling. SLAPPs are easier to enforce on traditional media, with their bricks and mortar presence.

The heart of Mr Walliams’s case was that he denied the claims made in the reports and could not endure the adverse publicity they would create.

He said he wanted to take his own life and was voluntarily admitted to a psychiatric hospital. In July, whilst receiving psychiatric care, he attempted suicide.

Shortly before the case was due for hearing, he was involuntarily admitted to hospital for psychiatric care and monitoring.

He said publication would harm his relationship with his 13-year-old son and the notification of the claims by the media companies had caused a serious deterioration in his mental health.

He sought an injunction to ban the publication of the allegations under articles 2, 3 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Both parties to the hearing agreed that the court did not have to make a finding about the truth of the allegations.

Article 2 of the ECHR protects the right to Life, Article 3 bans the use of torture, and Article 8 protects personal and family life.

Normally the provisions of the ECHR are taken to refer to protections for individuals from state interference or oppression. In this case, the alleged violators of human rights were The Guardian and ITN, two private sector media organisations.

The judge in the case, Mr Justice Matthew Nicklin - a High Court judge specialising in privacy and defamation law - said that whilst open justice, with all the parties named and public reporting of the case, was the norm, it was not absolute and there were circumstances in which limitations, such as anonymity, could be imposed in the interests of justice.

According to reporting in the Law Society Gazette this week, "the parties had agreed that the claimant (Mr Walliams) be assessed by a Single Joint Expert (a psychiatrist) within the injunction proceedings.

"That psychiatrist had produced a substantive report in September 2026, in which he identified serious mental vulnerability and an elevated risk of suicide and self-harm.

"His opinion was that, were the court to permit publication, the anticipation of publication and publication itself would produce a very substantial increase in the risk of psychiatric deterioration, suicidal ideation and suicidal acts.

"Nicklin J considered the psychiatric and other evidence. Although the claimant was at risk of suicide and publication would cause a very substantial increase in that risk, his stated intentions did not establish that suicide was inevitable.

"Publication while the claimant remained in hospital would be significantly safer in terms of reducing the likelihood of a successful suicide."

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In other words, Mr Walliams sued on the basis that he would take his own life if the stories were published, that the very fact that the investigation had been done and written up constituted torture or inhuman and degrading treatment, and that his relationship with his son would be damaged by publication.

The judge noted that Mr Walliam’s case did not rest on claims of defamation or use of private information or any other domestic law provisions, but solely on interpretation of provisions of European Human Rights Law that were designed to constrain states, not private organisations or individuals.

And he said the media organisations and their sources also had rights - expressed in Article 10 of the ECHR - to free speech and thought. In his judgment, Mr Justice Nicklin wrote: "The injunction sought would constitute an exceptionally serious interference with the rights engaged on the other side.

"It would prohibit the defendants from publishing the results of their investigations into allegations of serious wrongdoing by a prominent individual.

"It would also prevent the sources whose accounts form part of those investigations from communicating their experiences to the public through the defendants, thereby interfering with their Article 10 rights and, insofar as they seek to tell their own stories, with the interests in personal autonomy protected by Article 8."

He ruled that while the state was obliged to protect life, it was not obliged to act against private companies or individuals where the threat to life was perceived by the claimant. And he said that the state was seeking to protect Mr Walliams life by treating him in a psychiatric hospital.

"Article 8 does not require the court to eliminate every source of psychiatric distress by imposing a prior restraint upon the lawful activities of private parties."

In denying Mr Walliams an injunction banning publication of the stories, the judge wrote: "The journalism concerns matters of substantial public interest; the restraint sought would be comprehensive and potentially indefinite; the information itself is not alleged to be private; and the court is not in a position to find that the defendants’ investigation lacks a proper evidential foundation or that the proposed publications make no genuine contribution to public debate."

In other words, public participation by the media companies and the private individuals who told their stories was to be protected.

In short, he said that David Walliams claim that he would kill himself if the story was published was not a good enough reason to stop publication, and that the ECHR was not the proper legal basis for bringing such a case.

It's not the only example of European law being used in the domestic courts to prevent publication. CASE, the coalition against SLAPPs in Europe, is a Brussels-based monitoring group campaigning for an end to SLAPPs.

According to their research, there is an increasing use of GDPR as the grounds for trying to ban stories from being published.

EU competition law is also emerging as a ground for injunctions, with CASE documenting six known cases. Digital takedown notices and alleged copyright infringement are another avenue - the latter being a particularly sinister route.

In its latest report CASE says: "When a journalist is targeted for alleged copyright infringement over an image or proprietary quote used in an exposé, the legal focus is displaced from the substance and truthfulness of the reporting to the technicalities of usage rights.

"Such cases qualify as SLAPPs not by virtue of invoking copyright law per se, but where copyright is instrumentalised in bad faith to suppress lawful, public-interest reporting - particularly where the use is incidental, proportionate, or defensible under exceptions such as quotation or reporting.

"This enables SLAPP filers to silence critical online content - most commonly reporting on corruption (36.1% of 2,024 cases) or business-related issues - without ever having to contest the factual accuracy of the underlying investigation."

Then there are the traditional "lawfare" tactics of piling on cases, using lots of expensive lawyers and seeking massive amounts of damages in an effort to discourage defendants from taking on the legal risk of firstly defending their cases, and secondly going ahead with publication even if they win.

Such is the burden of expenses involved in SLAPP litigation that even to be accused of initiating a SLAPP action seems to be grounds for action against the media.

The Belfast band Kneecap yesterday received an apology from Sky News, after a contributor had wrongly alleged band members had used SLAPP actions to suppress stories.

The CASE report is written and researched by the Daphne Caruana Galizia foundation, named after the Maltese investigative journalist who was murdered by a car bomb.

At the time of her death, she was subject to 48 lawsuits trying to stop her exposure of corruption in Malta. Under Maltese law, her family inherited the lawsuits, and they continue to be fought, nine years after her death.

CASE has documented some 1,300 SLAPP-type suits brought across Europe since 2010. A total of 91 of them are in Malta, a small island with a population of 588,000.

France has the same number of SLAPP cases. Only Poland, with 140 cases has more SLAPPs. Ireland is quite active in the SLAPP front, with 34 cases, compared to 51 in the much bigger United Kingdom, and 38 in Germany. Similar population-sized Denmark and Finland had seven and two SLAPP cases respectively.

Most of the SLAPP cases involve allegations of corruption, or business malpractice. Only 26 of the 1,303 documented cases involve sexual abuse allegations.

As a result of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder, the European Union brought in 'Daphne’s Law' in 2024 - an EU law banning cross-border SLAPPs, the only action the EU could take.

But in turning the directive into domestic law, states are choosing to align domestic law with the EU law, meaning SLAPPs are becoming illegal within countries, as well as between countries.

Ireland was a bit slow moving to legislate, and the European Commission started infringement proceedings against the State in May, shortly before the start of the EU presidency for Ireland.

So, now a bill is moving through the Oireachtas rapidly. It has cleared the Dáil and has passed second stage in the Seanad. It enjoys widespread cross-party support in both chambers.

Introducing the Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation Bill 2026 in the Dáil, Minster of State at the Department of Justice Catherine Ardagh said: "SLAPPs are abusive court proceedings which are not taken to assert a right or seek genuine redress but to prevent, restrict or penalise public participation by threatening and intimidating people or organisations engaged in public criticism or debate.

"Common targets of SLAPPs include journalists, media outlets, and human rights defenders. SLAPP proceedings are often characterised by an imbalance of power with one party using the significant resources at their disposal to place financial and psychological pressure on the other.

"SLAPPs create a chilling effect on public interest reporting and debate and pose a significant danger to press freedom, public access to information and to democracy itself.

"The consequences of SLAPPs have been recognised at EU level. An anti-SLAPP recommendation was adopted by the European Commission in 2022 followed by the anti-SLAPP directive which came into force in 2024.

"The directive requires member states to introduce minimum procedural safeguards to combat abusive proceedings against public participation in civil and commercial cases which have a cross-border dimension.

"Those protections include the early dismissal of proceedings which are clearly or manifestly unfounded and the ability for targets of SLAPPs to seek more generous costs and damages as well as security for those costs and damages," she said.

Proposed law would protect Irish organisations, individuals

Significantly the proposed law would also protect Irish organisations and individuals from SLAPPs taken against them in non-EU countries, such as Britain.

Minister Ardagh told the Dáil on 29 September that "Section 13 prohibits the recognition or enforcement of judgments made in third-country proceedings that would have been considered abusive court proceedings against public participation, or manifestly unfounded if they had been initiated in the State.

"Section 14 allows targets of third-country SLAPP proceedings domiciled in Ireland to seek a declaration that those proceedings are abusive proceedings against public participation within the meaning of the legislation.

"Where such a declaration is made, a defendant may also seek compensation for damages and costs incurred in the third-country proceedings."

The bill tries to level the playing field in terms of the financial costs to defendants in SLAPP cases - typically journalists, publishers and campaign groups and whistleblowers - by imposing steeper cost terms on litigants who try and fail to block publication by SLAPPs.

The minister said: "Section 11 enables a target of SLAPP proceedings to seek damages for any injury, loss or harm suffered as a result of those proceedings.

"This is a significant provision which recognises the extraordinary and abusive nature of SLAPP proceedings.

"Its effect is two-fold. It will allow a defendant to obtain compensation for material and non-material damages resulting from the bringing of the proceedings, undercutting the frequent goal of SLAPP litigants to use financial pressure to silence public debate.

"SLAPP defendants will, therefore, be able to fully defend against a claim, secure in the knowledge that they will be able to seek compensation for their losses.

"These remedies will also deter those contemplating or pursuing SLAPP proceedings, by increasing their potential losses where they are unsuccessful."

So, the bill will allow for example a media company to apply to the court immediately a SLAPP action is initiated, asking the court to declare that the proceedings are abusive, rather than having to fight the entire case.

The "rapid strike out" clause cuts down dramatically on the efficacy of taking cases to tie up media organisations and others in long drawn out and expensive proceedings.

The court will also be able to levy punitive damages against the person bringing the action to prevent publication, and the court can order plaintiffs to put up the money to cover the defendants' legal costs before the action starts, so the defendants can have confidence their legal costs will be paid if the attempted SLAPP fails.

With massive legal fees involved in such cases, this could be a serious deterrent to vexatious cases being brought.

The legislation will also permit interested third parties such as NGOs and campaign groups to submit "friends of the court" briefs in SLAPP cases, and the existence of SLAPP cases must be published on the Courts Service website, reducing the amount of hiding space.

Britain too introduced its own anti-SLAPP legislation in 2025. But that act only applies to cases where economic crime is alleged.

As of today, the law still allows the rich and famous like David Walliams to try and stop publication of things they don’t want published about their private lives.

With no rapid strike-out clause in Britain, media organisations like the Guardian and ITN will continue to have to spend huge sums to vindicate their right to free speech, free thought and freedom to publish.

Another Brexit Benefit.