Sam Theedom v Nourish Training t/a CSP Recruitment and Another
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | His Honour Judge Moloney |
| Judgment Date | 11 December 2015 |
| Neutral Citation | [2015] EWHC 3769 (QB) |
| Docket Number | No. HQ15D02845 |
| Court | Queen's Bench Division |
| Date | 11 December 2015 |
[2015] EWHC 3769 (QB)
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
His Honour Judge Moloney QC
(Sitting as a Judge of the High Court)
No. HQ15D02845
Mr. W. Bennett (instructed by Carter-Ruck) appeared on behalf of the Claimant.
Ms. K. Wilson (instructed by Ward Hadaway) appeared on behalf of the Defendants.
A Introduction and Background
This judgment is given following the trial of two preliminary issues in a libel action, (a) to determine the actual defamatory meaning of the words complained of and (b) to determine, pursuant to s.1(1) of the Defamation Act 2013, whether the publications of the words complained of has caused or is likely to cause serious harm to the claimant's reputation.
Because this trial has been confined to those two very specific issues, it is important for me to emphasise at the outset of this judgment that neither of these issues relates to the "underlying merits" of the action on either side. Such questions as whether the allegations of which the claimant complains are in fact true or fair or whether the defendants were malicious in publishing them have not yet been determined, and may never be so. It follows that nobody reading a report of this judgment should form any adverse opinion about either party on the basis of it.
The background to the publication of the words complained of is as follows:
(a) The claimant, Mr. Sam Theedom, was about 25 at the date of the publication of the emails complained of, which was 29 th to 30 th June 2014. At that time, Mr. Theedom had been working for the first defendant firm for about a year. The first defendant is a recruitment consultancy based in Leicester, where Mr. Theedom comes from. No doubt it has clients elsewhere, but a great deal of its work is in that general area of the country.
(b) The claimant began work as a trainee recruitment consultant, but soon moved into working mainly on the employers', as opposed to the employees', side of the business and, in particular, on securing new business, mainly by telephone.
(c) In early 2014, two of his fellow CSP employees, Kate Kirszak and Zoe Crutchley, left CSP for a rival firm. Shortly after Kate Kirszak left CSP, in about May 2014, she became the claimant's girlfriend. This appears to have contributed to a deterioration in the claimant's relationship with the management of CSP.
(d) On 26 th June 2014, there was a meeting between the claimant and the managing director of CSP, Mr. Karl Purviss. During that meeting, the claimant was accused of leaking confidential information to Miss Kirszak and Miss Crutchley and their employer. It is disputed whether, at that meeting, the claimant was dismissed or, on the other hand, he resigned, but it appears clear that from that date his employment with CSP came to an end.
(e) Pursuant to the confidentiality clause in his employment contract, on 27 th June 2014 the claimant signed an undertaking which, among other things, listed 17 client companies with which he was not to deal for a period of six months.
(f) On 29 th to 30 th of June 2014, the second defendant, Mr. Colin Sewell, who is described as the management partner of CSP and appears to have been, unlike Mr. Purviss, Mr. Theedom's immediate manager, sent the emails complained of to a total of 124 different email addresses, that is to say different people, working for 102 different companies. Some companies received several emails, others only one. All of the recipients of the email were actual or potential customers of the first defendant; and some, though not all, were companies or persons with whom the claimant had had some dealings on behalf of CSP. I will deal more fully with the content of the email later in this judgment, but suffice it to say that the subject header says, "Dismissed for gross misconduct," and that the claimant is expressly named as the person who has been dismissed. (I should also note that the defendants have never published any form of correction, retraction or apology.)
(g) Having left the employment of CSP, the claimant had no difficulty in securing several job interviews in the recruitment sector and, on 21 st July 2014, he began a new job of a broadly similar nature in the Leicester office of a recruitment firm called Quest. He still retains that job now, 18 months later. Over that period, his work has been confined to Quest client employers based within the county of Leicestershire.
(h) The claimant had found out about the emails almost immediately, though he did not know until disclosure in this action the precise distribution. After some discussions with CPS about the email, he contacted a firm of solicitors in October 2014, and was put in touch with his present solicitors in March 2015. Proceedings were commenced and, by consent, it was ordered, on 14 th September 2015, that the present preliminary issue should be the subject of a trial and that service of a full defence should be postponed pending the hearing.
(i) Disclosure and exchange of witness statements on these issues, and specifically on the seriousness issue, have taken place, and the preliminary trial has taken place before me over part, though not all, of three court days. This is now the fourth. The claimant and Mr. Purviss gave oral evidence and were cross-examined and other evidence was given in written form. I reserved judgment, save that I had given the parties at the end of Day 2 the defamatory meaning that I proposed to find, in order to assist them with their submissions on the issue of seriousness.
B Defamatory Meaning
The 124 emails complained of are not all identical, but it is agreed that there is only one material variation, which affects only the last nine of them. The following text is, for all material purposes, that of the first 115 emails. The header indicates that it is from Colin Sewell. The subject is, "Dismissed for gross misconduct." The text is as follows:
"I am writing to all CSP customers and companies we have previously been in contact with to make them aware that we have had a very serious incident occur with one of our staff. Following an investigation, we have discovered that one of recruitment consultants, Sam Theedom, has been passing confidential company and customer information to his girlfriend, Kate Kirszak, who works for an agency called Maloy & Flynn, and Zoe Crutchley, who moved to Precision Recruitment two months ago, but who has now also joined Malloy & Flynn. As you may already know, Kate and Zoe are both ex-employees of CSP who left earlier this year and who, unfortunately, we have been forced to take legal action against to try to prevent them from targeting our customers and business.
It now appears that, over the past three months, Sam has been regularly passing both women details of our business and our customers and, as a result, he has been dismissed for Gross Misconduct. He has been passing both of them details of the conversations and proposals we have been working on with our customers and has, undoubtedly, seriously undermined us. If you haven't already, you may be getting a call from one of these women in future.
We are now considering whether to take criminal action against Sam. We are not aware whether the owners and directors of Malloy & Flynn are aware of what has been going on, but we will be contacting them to raise the matter with them.
Kind Regards,
Colin Sewell
Managing Partner."
It goes on to give his contact details.
As I have said, that is the text of the first 115 emails. The difference, which affects the last nine only, is that they omit the following important sentence:
"We are now considering whether to take criminal action against Sam."
It follows that the defamatory meaning of those nine emails is likely to be somewhat different from that applying to the majority version.
The principles by which a trial judge, sitting without a jury, should determine the defamatory meaning of words are, by now, very well established. In the case of a relatively short and straightforward publication of this kind, neither counsel suggested that any special difficulty of law arose in applying those principles. They can conveniently be summarised in the words of Sir Anthony Clarke, Master of the Rolls, at para.14 of his judgment in the case of Jeynes v News Magazines Ltd. & Anr. [2008] EWCA Civ. 130:
"( 1) The governing principle is reasonableness.
(2) The hypothetical reasonable reader is not naïve but he is not unduly suspicious. He can read between the lines. He can read in an implication more readily than a lawyer and may include in a certain amount of loose thinking, but he must be treated as a man who is not avid for scandal and someone who does not, and should not, select one bad meaning where other non-defamatory meanings are available.
(3) Over-elaborate analysis is best avoided.
(4) The intention of the publisher is irrelevant.
(5) The article must be read as a whole, and any "bane and antidote" taken together.
(6) The hypothetical reader is taken to be representative of those who would read the publication in question.
[(7) does not apply to a case of this kind.]
(8) It follows that "it is not enough to say that by some person or another the words might be understood in a defamatory sense.""
Both parties accepted that the words complained of in this case refer to the claimant and are defamatory of him, with a core meaning that he has been guilty of gross misconduct in his employment. The debate between them concerned the detail and gravity of the meaning that...
To continue reading
Request your trial
-
Andrew Guise v Rajeev Shah
...provide assistance including Cooke v Mirror Group Newspapers [2014] EWHC 2831 (QB); [2015] 1 WLR 895; Theedom v Nourish Training [2015] EWHC 3769 (QB); [2016] EMLR 10; Sobrinho v Impresa Publishing SA [2016] EWHC 66 (QB); [2016] EMLR 12; and Monroe v Hopkins [2017] EWHC 433 (QB); [2017]......
-
Nicholas Hugh Brown v Tom Bower and Another
...Lachaux v Independent Print Ltd (above), Business Energy Solutions Ltd v Scrivener [2015] EWHC 2948 (QB), Theedom v Nourish Training [2015] EWHC 3769 (QB) [2016] EMLR 10, Sobrinho v Impresa Publishing SA [2016] EWHC 66 (QB) [2016] EMLR 12, Undre v Harrow LBC [2016] EWHC 931 (QB) [2017] EMLR......
-
Jack Monroe v Katie Hopkins
...[2015] 1 WLR 3409 [52]. 2 As pointed out by HHJ Moloney QC (sitting as a Judge of the High Court) in Theedom v Nourish Training Ltd [2015] EWHC 3769 (QB) [2016] EMLR 10 [15](h). "it is important to bear in mind that s 1 is essentially a threshold requirement, intended by Parliament to weed ......
-
Lachaux v Independent Print Ltd
...this as the preferred approach of Judge Moloney QC (sitting as a Judge of the High Court) in the case of Theedom v Nourish Trading [2015] EWHC 3769 (QB). In that case the judge was dealing with preliminary issues both as to the defamatory meaning of the words used and as to whether publicat......