New privacy farce as love-cheat celebrity is named by mistake
Injunction fails to stop UK website revealing his identity
A CELEBRITY who obtained a gagging order after he cheated on his famous spouse was mistakenly named in official court documents, despite a judge ruling his identity should be kept secret.
The married personality’s name is protected by a controversial injunction preventing details of his affairs being published in Britain, even though he has been widely named in America and on social media.
But The Mail on Sunday can reveal today that a bungling senior judge’s clerk accidentally sent an unedited version of the ruling, including the names of the couple, to legal publications in Britain that put it online for all to see. The uncensored judgment, intended to preserve the celebrity’s privacy by stopping a British newspaper printing details of his affairs, was put on a law website available to the public and remained there for 24 hours.
A day later the error was spotted and court staff frantically tried to wipe the names from the internet sites where they appeared.
But this newspaper can reveal that the names can still be seen on at least one website, along with a summary of the case.
Last night, experts said the blunder deepened the farce surrounding the draconian secrecy ruling.
Mark Stephens, media law expert at London-based law firm Howard Kennedy, said: ‘Obviously mistakes happen and it’s disappointing for the celebrity that one happened in this instance.
‘But again it demonstrates that there are other areas where the name was known. The idea that this should be left private has been lost.’
He added that the case was rapidly approaching the fiasco of the privacy injunction taken out by football star Ryan Giggs five years ago to prevent details of an affair being published. He eventually gave up the fight to protect his anonymity after he was named in Parliament and the gagging order was widely flouted online.
In the latest case, the celebrity, who has children with his partner, applied for a privacy injunction in January after a couple with whom he had a threesome approached a newspaper to tell their story.
A High Court judge turned down the application because the celebrity’s cheating went against his public appearance of married commitment. He then went to the Court of Appeal, where Lord Justice Jackson and Lady Justice King agreed the British media should be banned from naming him. They said public and press interest in the couple and their children would be ‘devastating’ and outweighed the right to publish.
But the injunction does not apply in the US, so the full story, complete with names, has been told in an American publication. As the gagging order cannot be easily enforced online, the names have also been widely shared on social networks.
However, it can be revealed today for the first time that the court itself inadvertently named the celebrity.
The oral judgment by the Appeal Court was given at the end of January, then written up by official transcription company DTI early in March and emailed to the judges’ clerks for approval.
The first version had the celebrity couple’s names replaced by random initials PJS and YMA. But one of the clerks noticed the case number was missing and asked for it to be added.
The transcribers then accidentally sent back an earlier draft of the judgment that included the full names.
The clerks failed to spot the error and forwarded the ruling to The British and Irish Legal Information Institute (Bailii), a popular website set up by academics to provide free copies of important court judgments. It was uploaded on March 8 and remained until the next day. It was viewed an estimated 70 times.
When court staff were alerted, they scrambled to have the online judgment removed and had to break the news to the celebrity. Sources said he was reassured few people had seen the uncensored ruling.
An unredacted summary of the case also appeared on a website that boasts it has 130,000 subscribers. Although it has since been deleted, a cached version is still visible under the headline ‘Court of Appeal grants
‘The idea it should be private has been lost’ An archived online version is still visible
interim injunction to [celebrity’s name]’. An archived version of the article is also still visible.
A spokesman for the Judicial Office, which speaks for judges, said: ‘On March 8 the transcribing company mistakenly sent a version of the judgment which included names of the parties in the case of PJS to a member of court staff, who then sent it on to Bailii and law-reporting agencies which routinely receive Court of Appeal judgments.
‘Bailii did publish the judgment on March 8 but as soon as the error was noticed the following morning, all agencies were contacted and all confirmed that they had either not used or had deleted all references.
‘The parties in the case were made aware of the publication in error, and that it had been remedied. The injunction preventing publication of the names of the parties remained active at all times.’