Carole Cadwalladr has won a libel case against prominent Brexit supporter Arron Banks after successfully arguing her Twitter was an "echo chamber".
Mr Banks sued the investigative reporter for libel after she claimed in a 2019 TED Talk that he had told “lies” about “his covert relationship with the Russian government".
Ms Cadwalladr later posted a tweet which included a link to the talk and Mr Banks, who has always strongly denied the allegations, sued for libel because the statements were "false and defamatory".
On Monday, High Court judge Mrs Justice Steyn dismissed Mr Banks' claim, concluding that Ms Cadwalladr held a "reasonable belief" that her comments were in the public interest.
The judgment concluded that when Ms Cadwalladr posted the link to her talk, she was sharing it with her Twitter followers who “are likely to be persons within her own echo chamber” and “it’s probably right that they wouldn’t have thought very much of [the claimant] by that time”.
“In my judgment, those within the jurisdiction to whom the tweet was published are likely to consist of people whose opinion of the claimant was of no consequence to him,” Mrs Justice Steyn ruled.
The argument was originally made by William McCormick QC, for Ms Cadwalladr, during the initial libel hearings.
Media law expert David Banks said the successful argument is “a little bit of a cat among the pigeons”.
“Basically echo chambers, which is how the judgment refers to Carole’s followers, do less harm than someone whose followers have a more diverse range of views,” he tweeted following the judgment.
'The judge felt sorry for Carole '
Mr Banks suggested he will likely appeal the ruling, tweeting: “The judge felt sorry for Carole is how I would sum it up. Defamatory but no serious harm. I suppose falsely accusing someone of taking Russian money for Brexit doesn’t cut the ice. It’s likely I will appeal.”
Ms Cadwalladr, a freelance journalist who writes for The Guardian and The Observer, has investigated the funding of the referendum campaigns and alleged misuse of data.
In her ruling, Mrs Justice Steyn said: "Based on her investigation, Ms Cadwalladr had reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Banks had been offered 'sweetheart' deals by the Russian government in the period running up to the EU referendum, although she had seen no evidence he had entered into any such deals; and Mr Banks's financial affairs, and the source of his ability to make the biggest political donations in UK history, were opaque.
“Most importantly, when Ms Cadwalladr gave the Ted Talk the Electoral Commission had announced, following a one-year investigation, that it had reasonable grounds to suspect that Mr Banks was not the true source of the £8 million loans/donations, but rather the source was a non-qualifying company, Rock Holdings, which is based in an offshore, non-transparent, jurisdiction.
"In addition, when she gave the Ted Talk, the matter had been referred to the NCA and that organisation was investigating."
The judge found that the tweet Mr Banks complained about had not caused "serious harm" to his reputation, but concluded that, if she had, she would have concluded Ms Cadwalladr's belief that the tweet was in the public interest was also reasonable.
