We were recently involved in a high profile defamation action where we were able to achieve a very rapid and satisfactory settlement for journalist John Waters and others in an action against RTE.
RTE have been criticised for the handling of this case and one of the criticisms has been that they settled the case too quickly. That is one of the issues I want to address in this email.
If a person is defamed it means that a statement has been made which injures that person’s reputation in the eyes of reasonable members of society.
The law covering defamation is now set out in one comprehensive document, the Defamation Act, 2009. Previously you had to issue your proceedings within either three years or six years depending on the type of defamation but the position now is that proceedings must issue within 12 months.
This makes sense because if you are claiming that your reputation has been damaged and you do nothing about it for 2½ or 5½ years, it will be very hard to say that you were upset that your reputation was damaged when you took no action to deal with the matter.
In the John Waters case, we moved very quickly and we first of all simply sought an apology. That was all our client wanted. Our client had to move quickly because his reputation is a very precious thing and the allegation that he was homophobic was clearly defamatory. We strongly advised him to seek damages as a mark of the seriousness of the issue and we vigorously pressed RTE to settle this case quickly because if the matter went on, the damage to our client’s reputation could only get worse. RTE accepted this and ultimately we were able to compromise the matter and it settled within two weeks of the publication of the offending comments on the Saturday Night Show.
Many people have said that they thought the case settled extraordinarily quickly. It did, but that is only as it should be.
We were happy to achieve a good settlement for our client in that case and we were happy that RTE accepted that this was an extremely serious issue and one that should be addressed as a matter of urgency. They knew they could not succeed with any Defence of the case and they settled it quickly and in doing so saved the tax payer a very substantial sum of money.
The lesson to be learned is that if you are defamed, you have to move immediately. You cannot argue that your reputation was damaged and you were enormously upset that your reputation was damaged and then sit back and do nothing. Even a delay of weeks could be extremely damaging. If you move quickly, it emphasises how seriously you take the matter and it will encourage the other side to settle the case quickly if the claim is clear and undeniable. Even if it is not, you will at least ensure that the case moves along quickly as it is in nobody’s interest to drag out litigation any longer than it is absolutely necessary.
No comments:
Post a Comment