Jack Monroe v Katie Hopkins
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | Mr Justice Warby |
| Judgment Date | 10 March 2017 |
| Neutral Citation | [2017] EWHC 433 (QB) |
| Docket Number | Case No: HQ15D05286 |
| Court | Queen's Bench Division |
| Date | 10 March 2017 |
[2017] EWHC 433 (QB)
Mr Justice Warby
Case No: HQ15D05286
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
William Bennett and Greg Callus (instructed by Seddons) for the Claimant
Jonathan Price (instructed by Kingsley Napley) for the Defendant
Hearing dates: 27, 28 February, 1 March 2017
Approved Judgment
I direct that pursuant to CPR PD 39A para 6.1 no official shorthand note shall be taken of this Judgment and that copies of this version as handed down may be treated as authentic.
Introduction
This is the trial of a libel claim arising from two tweets sent by the defendant, Katie Hopkins, about the claimant, Jack Monroe, on 18 May 2015. The defendant is a journalist who writes for the Daily Mail. The claimant is a food blogger and writer. The claimant, assigned female gender at birth, now identifies as "non-binary transgender". But by agreement, I shall call her Ms Monroe and use feminine pronouns.
Ms Monroe's complaint is that the tweets accused her of vandalising a war memorial and desecrating the memory of those who fought for her freedom, or of approving or condoning such behaviour. Ms Hopkins does not suggest that Ms Monroe did behave in either of these ways. Her answer to the claim is that her tweets do not bear the meanings complained of; are not defamatory of Ms Monroe according to common law principles; and, or in any event, are not defamatory because it has not been shown that they caused serious harm to Ms Monroe's reputation, as required by s 1 of the Defamation Act 2013.
The issues as to liability are, therefore, (1) what meanings were borne by the tweets, (2) whether those meanings had a defamatory tendency, and if so (3) whether it has been proved that the serious harm requirement is met.
The trial has been short. The only oral evidence has been that of Ms Monroe, who has been cross-examined for the best part of a day. Mrs Hopkins has not given evidence. She relies on two witness statements made by her solicitor, Ms Harris, analysing a body of twitter records. Those statements have been admitted into evidence by agreement, without cross-examination, though without accepting the accuracy of the analysis. Ms Hopkins also relies on facts and documents that have been put before the Court by agreement.
The facts
Twitter is an online news and social networking service, which is widely used and very well known. It allows people using the Twitter website or a mobile device app to post and interact with messages of not more than 140 characters, called "tweets". This much is common knowledge. But Twitter is still a relatively new medium, and not everyone knows all the details of how it works. Where something is not a matter of common knowledge a Judge is not entitled to bring his or her own knowledge to bear. The facts normally have to be proved. In this case, however, many of the relevant facts about Twitter have been agreed, and set out in a Schedule called "How Twitter Works", which is attached to this judgment as an Appendix. I shall employ the abbreviations used in the Appendix.
Estimates for the number of followers of the claimant and defendant at the relevant times are agreed. Figures for the number of impressions, or the number of times various tweets first posted in 2015 were re-tweeted, liked, or replied to, are available from more recent data sources. These are unlikely to represent the exact position at the relevant times. But I accept that the fast-moving nature of Twitter means that these figures can be relied on as giving a broadly accurate picture of how things stood at the times of publication.
The claimant
Ms Monroe is 28 years old. She comes from a family with military connections. Her father was in the British Army for 7 years, being decorated for active service in the Falklands. He spent the next 30 years in the Fire Service. One of her three brothers is a Flying Officer in the RAF. She herself applied to join the RAF at the same time as her brother but was not accepted. She joined the Fire Service, serving for some 4 years between 2007 and 2011. She left the service due to the difficulties of combining it with motherhood, and spent 18 months on benefits. In 2012 she began blogging, on political topics. She is on the left. In due course she became a food blogger and cooking journalist, gaining a cookbook deal in around May 2013 and joining The Guardian in October 2013 writing recipe and cookery columns as well as more general political commentary. She has played a role in mainstream politics, speaking at Parliament on the debate about food banks, contributing to a report by Frank Field MP and speaking at Party Conferences.
Ms Monroe joined Twitter when in the Fire Service. From early 2012 her Twitter handle was @MsJackMonroe. Although she has changed it since, that was her handle at the times relevant to this case, when she had around 70 – 75,000 followers. At that time, she was on Twitter "every spare waking moment" as she puts it. She accepts the defendant's estimate that she had tweeted around 20,000 times. She also accepts the defendant's pleaded characterisation of her as "an outspoken political activist" who "has been highly critical of the Conservative Party and its policies – particularly its pursuit of austerity measures – whilst in Government". She is, I find, often forthright in the way she expresses herself, and has quite often used profanities and other strong language, on Twitter. This is a description that those who know her from Twitter would recognise – though they might use different words.
The defendant
Ms Hopkins' Twitter handle is @KTHopkins. Her current Twitter profile describes her as a "Columnist @MailOnline, LBC Radio Host, CBB Runner Up…" In May 2015 her profile identified her as a columnist for The Sun. For the purposes of this case she describes herself as "confrontational, outspoken, forthright, often outrageous and frequently flippant in her journalism and social media activity, and very well known as such." With the exception of the words "frequently flippant" this description was accepted by Ms Monroe under cross-examination. On the basis of the evidence in this case I would agree with it. I would agree that Ms Hopkins is sometimes flippant. Ms Hopkins has sometimes been described in the print media as "rentagob", but this is not a term that Ms Monroe had heard used about her. She said "I tend to move in circles of cookery and politics rather than outrage and vitriol". The evidence shows that Ms Hopkins is often acerbic, and known to be so. Mr Price has not pressed the point he put to the claimant, that "rentagob" is how everyone sees Ms Hopkins. The general picture is not, however, significantly controversial. Nor is it controversial that her politics are of the right.
When Ms Hopkins joined Twitter is not disclosed in the evidence, but the evidence is that her homepage is very popular, with over 5.7 million visits in each of April and May 2015. It is an agreed fact at the relevant times she had about 570,000 followers, and had tweeted about 44,000 times. The evidence makes clear that she was tweeting frequently. By way of example, the Twitter Analytics for her account show that on 18 May 2015 she sent her first tweet at 7:07am, and the second tweet complained of, sent at 21:47, was her 30 th of the day.
Ms Penny
Another character who features quite prominently in this case, though not as a witness, is another journalist Laurie Penny, a columnist for the New Statesman magazine. Her Twitter handle at the relevant time was @PennyRed. As this summary suggests, she is of the political left. In March 2016 she had about 128,000 followers. A reasonable estimate of her followers in May 2015 is 100,000.
The history in short
On Thursday 7 May 2015 there was a General Election. On 8 May the Conservative Party formed a Government. On Saturday 9 May, there was an "anti-austerity" demonstration in London. It turned violent, and the Memorial to the Women of WWII in Whitehall was vandalised. The words "Fuck Tory Scum" were spray painted on it. This act was widely reported in the news and elsewhere, with photographs of those words sprayed on the plinth. The act caused public outrage and widespread public condemnation.
It is Ms Monroe's unchallenged evidence, which I accept, that she was aware of the graffiti via the news media and, despite her general support for anti-austerity groups, "as a proud member of a military family and a feminist" she flatly opposed and was "sickened" by it. She agrees with an official statement issued from Downing Street at the time that this was a "despicable display of disrespect for those who fought and died for their country".
On the evening of 9 May 2015 there was Twitter activity relevant to this claim:-
(1) At 8pm, a Twitter user with the handle @Little_G2 tweeted @PennyRed, sending a photograph of the vandalised memorial and asking @PennyRed to comment on it.
(2) At 8.01pm @PennyRed commented: "@Little_G2 @CCriadoPerez actually, I think that's fine, and many of those women would have agreed. Sadly they were not able to vote.?" This comment was RT'd 25 times.
(3) At 8.04pm @PennyRed tweeted a photograph of the vandalised war memorial with the accompanying words: "I don't have a problem with this. The bravery of past generations does not oblige us to be cowed today." This tweet generated a deal of comment, much of it adverse. This tweet was RT'd 356 times, liked 226 times and replied to in 618 tweets.
(4) At 9.40pm Ms Hopkins tweeted a photograph of the vandalised war memorial, and a link to @PennyRed's tweet of 8.04pm with these observations: "@PennyRed thinks this is OK. Burn her passport, bulk buy her lube &...
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