Cornelius v de Taranto
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | LORD JUSTICE MANTELL,LORD JUSTICE LATHAM,LORD JUSTICE SIMON BROWN |
| Judgment Date | 17 October 2001 |
| Neutral Citation | [2001] EWCA Civ 1511 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Civil Division) |
| Date | 17 October 2001 |
| Docket Number | Case No: A2/2000/2569 |
[2001] EWCA Civ 1511
IN THE SUPREME COURT OF JUDICATURE
COURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL DIVISION)
ON APPEAL FROM MR JUSTICE MORLAND
At the Royal Courts of Justice
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand,
London, WC2A 2LL
Lord Justice Simon Brown
Lord Justice Mantell and
Lord Justice Latham
Case No: A2/2000/2569
Mr R Seabrook QC and Miss A Marzec (instructed by Le Brasseur J Tickle for the Appellant/Defendant)
Mrs P Cornelius (in person as Respondent/Claimant)
This is an appeal by a consultant, forensic psychiatrist against a finding that she had breached the confidence of a client. There is also a free-standing appeal against the order for costs.
Background.
Pamela Cornelius is a married lady in her mid-fifties. She has a degree in social science from Liverpool Polytechnic and for the last eleven years has been a teacher at the Sydney Russell School in Dagenham. So it may be taken that she is reasonably well educated and of at least average intelligence.
Mrs Cornelius had been recruited for her present job soon after the Sydney Russell School was formed. According to Mrs Cornelius in its early years the school experienced a number of difficulties which largely came about through staff rivalries and lack of discipline among the pupils. Mrs Cornelius blames the then head teacher. Happily, it seems that most of those difficulties have now been resolved and, again according to Mrs Cornelius, the school is prospering under a new head. However, that was not the position in 1995 and in the first half of that year Mrs Cornelius felt that the conditions under which she was required to work were beginning to affect her health. She contemplated resigning and bringing a claim for constructive dismissal. To that end she consulted solicitors. The firm she selected was E. Edward, Son & Noice of East Ham. The representative attending to her case was a Mr Turner. Mr Turner thought that Mrs Cornelius might be better advised to seek damages for personal injury but he was not for giving up the alternative claim altogether. As he explained to Mrs Cornelius he was a "belt and braces" man. As a first step he suggested that Mrs Cornelius should obtain a report from a consultant psychiatrist with a view to finding out whether Mrs Cornelius' health problems could properly be attributed to her conditions of employment. On 2 nd August 1995 Mr Turner wrote to Dr de Taranto, at that time the Senior Registrar in Forensic Psychiatry at Camlet Lodge Regional Secure Unit at Enfield Middlesex, explaining the concerns felt by Mrs Cornelius and including the following paragraph:
"As our client is a teacher, she is currently on vacation until 4 th September and she would therefore hope to attend for examination before then, as this would preserve her confidentiality."
Dr de Taranto wrote back by return setting out her charges and enclosing a form for Mrs Cornelius' signature giving permission for Dr de Taranto to have access to all relevant medical, psychiatric, probation and social work records. Mrs Cornelius never did sign the form but on 10 th August Mr Turner wrote to Dr de Taranto informing her that he hoped that the records of the general practitioner together with any documents retained by Mrs Cornelius would be available by the date of the consultation which, by that time, had been arranged for 30 th August.
On 30 th August 1995 the proposed consultation duly took place at the Royal Free Hospital in London. Mrs Cornelius attended together with her husband. Unfortunately, the general practitioner's records were not available. Indeed, Dr de Taranto did not write to ask for them until 5 th September. It is not entirely clear from the correspondence when the records did reach Dr de Taranto except that she must have had them some time before the preparation of her report, which was dated 29 th September.
There is serious disagreement between Mrs Cornelius and Dr de Taranto as to what was said during the consultation on 30 th August. It is a matter to which I shall have to return. For present purposes I need only say that Dr de Taranto rapidly came to the conclusion that Mrs Cornelius was suffering from a psychiatric condition which was likely to respond to treatment and she claims to have obtained the agreement of Mrs Cornelius to her case being referred to a consultant psychiatrist. Mrs Cornelius has always maintained that she agreed to no such thing and that when the matter was raised she made it plain that her purpose in seeing Dr de Taranto was to obtain a medico-legal report and that she had no wish either to be referred to or attend upon another doctor. However that may be, on 29 th September Dr de Taranto sent copies of her report to the Consultant Psychiatrist at Goodmayes Hospital in Ilford and also to Mr Turner and the general practitioner. Because Mr Turner was away on holiday Mrs Cornelius did not get to see the report until 10 th October. When she did she was furious. She considered that in sending the report to the consultant psychiatrist and to her G.P. Dr de Taranto had breached her duty of confidentiality and worse still, by reason of the contents of the report, had libelled her. Also she was not a little displeased with Mr Turner. Her displeasure was eloquently vented in her letter to Mr Turner of 10 th October. It includes the following passage:
"As stated, I do not know exactly where Ms de Taranto has obtained the appalling, distorted and incorrect information. She does state that in part she has consulted full records from my current G.P. Dr Patel. I have not been privy to the "full records" and neither, apparently, have you according to your statement in your letter. I hope there is no professional indiscretion involved here. I find it very disturbing that you state that Dr de Taranto says that she has used this as a part basis to her derogatory, incriminating report. Surely I should have been allowed to see Dr Patel's report before agreeing that it was sent anywhere and such incriminating judgements being made. I would also be obliged to know to which previous practitioner in Liverpool dating back to 1964 she refers to. I have not been privy to such information.
Mr Turner, I must remind you that I came to see you in good faith as a professional mature person for advice concerning legal aspects of my current employment situation. I did not come to you as a mentally deluded person subject to " mood disorder" treatment as Dr de Taranto states in writing her report."
The upshot was that Mrs Cornelius withdrew her instructions from E. Edward, Son & Noice and went elsewhere. Eventually on 9 th January 1998 and following the usual letter before action the new solicitors issued and served a writ and statement of claim claiming damages against Dr de Taranto for defamation and breach of confidence. Essential to her case under both heads was an averment that Dr de Taranto had sent her report to the consultant psychiatrist and to the G.P. without first having obtained her consent to do so and which in any event, had it been sought, she would have refused. The response of Dr de Taranto was to say that Mrs Cornelius had agreed to the suggestion that she be referred for treatment in consequence of which the report had been made available both to the consultant and to the G.P. With regard to the libel claim Mrs Cornelius relied upon material in the report recording the fact that she had broken into a chemist shop and stolen drugs when she was about nineteen years of age, that she had deliberately lied to Dr de Taranto during the consultation and that by reason of her mental condition she was unable to conduct her life in a balanced and fully rational way. The pleaded defence was that insofar as those statements were defamatory they were in fact substantially true.
The Trial.
The trial of the action took place during May 2000 at the Royal Courts of Justice. The judge was Morland J. Both sides were represented by Leading and Junior Counsel. Two days into the trial the defendant abandoned her defence of justification in relation to the reference in her report to the claimant having been convicted of burglary. That followed the discovery that the record at the relevant court had been misinterpreted by a junior employee of the defendant's solicitors. Instead the defendant relied on section 5 of the Defamation Act 1952. The main battle, however, was fought on the narrow issue of fact identified in the pleadings, that is whether the claimant had agreed to the suggestion that she be referred for treatment. The evidence was heard over six working days with witness statements standing as evidence in chief.
Dealing in her witness statement with the consultation the claimant stated:
"At the end of the fifty minutes she stated, to the utter surprise of both myself and my husband, that she considered that I was suffering from agitated depression and that she would refer me to my local psychiatric services. I told her this was neither necessary or appropriate and was not the object of my visit or the interview. When we left, I did not think that Dr de Taranto would actually carry out her stated intentions, in fact this would have been unthinkable, going on past experience of doctors I have met and, given the training received by doctors in Britain, with regard to the strict rules of confidentiality and the rights of patients (although in this case I was not a patient) to refuse treatment, etc."
In support of her contention that she had never agreed to being referred for treatment the claimant pointed out that such consent would be wholly inconsistent with her acknowledged reluctance...
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