Legal Research

Millions of peaches peaches for free

By scott

“Millions of peaches peaches for free / Millions of peaches peaches for me” (Presidents of the USA)

I was please to see Peaches Geldof getting a result at the High Court

The Daily Star had published a front page article with headline: ?PEACHES: SPEND NIGHT WITH ME FOR £5K?. which was then followed up by a full article on page 5 of the paper describing how Peaches and her girlie pals rake in the mega bucks for providing their services at A-list parties?, and implying that Miss Geldof was infact prostituting herself.

Geldof complained to the Press Complaints Commission and the paper and Miss Geldof agreed to the text of a retraction:

?In our edition of 29 September we ran an article on our front page and page 5 about Peaches Geldof. The front page article carried the headline ?PEACHES: SPEND NIGHT WITH ME FOR £5K?. The article went on to state that ?Peaches and her girlie pals rake in the mega bucks for providing their services at A-list parties?. We now accept that Peaches does not charge a fee to attend parties or events like London Fashion Week as was claimed in the article. We also apologise to Peaches for the implication in the headline that she provided services of a personal or sexual nature for the payment of a fee.?

Where the parties differed was in where they thought the retraction should appear. The Star went for page 2, Miss Geldof thought it should have been on page 1. The PCC agreed with the Star stating: ” While the front page may have been open to a certain interpretation, it did not contain any specific claims about the ?services? offered by the complainant. The inside article did not suggest that the services were in any way sexual, and made clear that they related to non-controversial entertainment at parties. As the front page article did not carry a specifically inaccurate claim, and as the main inaccuracy was on page 5, the decision to locate the apology prominently on page 2 (with a photograph) was, in the Commission?s view, proportionate.”

Not happy with that, Miss Geldof decided to take the case to the High Court accusing the paper of Libel. Express Newspapers was represented in court by its solicitor, Zoe Norden, to withdraw the allegations and to apologise publicly to Geldof for the distress caused to her by publication of the article “The defendant accepts that there is no truth in the allegation made in the article, and apologises to the claimant for any distress caused by the publication.” It also paid her a substantial sum by way of damages and agreed to pay her legal costs.

Good for Peaches. Bad for the PCC.

I’m sorry, ” the front page may have been open to a certain interpretation.” Really? I’m not sure how a full page spread and headline saying ?PEACHES: SPEND NIGHT WITH ME FOR £5K?, was going to be interpreted as anything other than suggesting she was selling her body for that sum, or that that was not the intention of the paper in publishing that headline, otherwise it would have said ” PEACHES: GELDOF CHARGES 5K TO SHOW UP AT PARTIES?. It frankly did not matter that it didn’t contain any specific claims about the ?services? offered by Peaches. Another example of why the PCC is a joke.

Full post as published by Information Overload on January 14, 2010 (boomark / email).