After becoming the first ever woman to win an Olympic gold medal in boxing, Nicola Adams was featured in "Lioness: The Nicola Adams Story", a documentary about her life published by Amazon Digital UK Limited (the owner of the Amazon Prime Video streaming services) in November 2021. The show follows Adams' career until she hung up her boxing gloves in 2019, as well as her personal life and relationships.
Post-publication, Nicola's mother, Denver Dorsetra Adams (referred to as ‘Dee’ in the proceedings) brought various claims against Amazon for libel and misuse of private information. The claims primarily revolved around (i) Nicola's accounts of the abuse she and Dee suffered when Nicola was a child and (ii) recent abusive messages Dee had sent to her daughter.
The Claims
1. The Libel Claim
Dee contended that the documentary erroneously suggests that her sending abusive and threatening text messages to Nicola was the primary cause of the deterioration of her relationship with her daughter. Dee claimed that the self-admitted abusive texts were a byproduct of an already strained relationship which actually arose from a larger family feud and for Amazon to suggest otherwise was libellous and lacked factual basis.
2. The Misuse of Private Information Claim
Dee also alleged that some of the content in the documentary was a misuse of her private information. In particular, the information about Nicola's upbringing, the recounts of domestic abuse she suffered from her father and a subsequent partner of Dee's, and the recent text messages.
Amazon's Application
Amazon made an application seeking summary judgment on 17 June 2024 on the grounds that:
- The allegedly libellous statements are unarguably true and/or reflect honest opinion; and
- The allegedly private information is not private and/or the documentary is not a misuse of that information due to (a) Nicola's right to talk about her own life, (b) the public interest in Nicola's account of her own life and (c) the fact that the content was already widely published and will likely continue to be so.
For Amazon to obtain summary judgment, it needed to demonstrate to the court that the Claimant had no "realistic" prospect of success with her claims should the case proceed to trial. A "realistic" claim is held to be one with some degree of conviction i.e. it is more than merely arguable (ED & F Man Liquid Products v Patel).
Judgment
Amazon were successful in obtaining summary judgment in relation to both the libel and misuse of private information claims.
1. The Libel Claim
The Judge, Deputy High Court Judge Susie Alegre, held that the Claimant had no realistic prospect of success in challenging the Defendant's defences of truth and honest opinion.
For a defence of truth, Amazon, as the Defendant, would need to show that the imputation of the statements complained of are "substantially" true, not that they are entirely or literally true. DHCJ Alegre decided that the Claimant had no realistic prospect of defeating this defence at trial as the core defamatory sting, being the admitted fact that Dee did send her daughter abusive messages, was true. The judgment also stated that the disputes over causation were irrelevant to the truth defence – i.e. it was irrelevant whether the messages alone ruined the mother/daughter relationship.
To defeat the defence of honest opinion, Dee would have to prove that Amazon knew, or ought to have known, that Nicola did not hold the opinions in question. For example, the Claimant's representation argued that the abuse Nicola suffered from her father amounted to "discipline", especially in light of prevailing attitudes of the 1980s. Therefore, there was no abuse on which to base Nicola's opinion and Amazon knew, or ought to have known, that.
After considering some of the undisputed facts, including Dee's divorce petition showing Nicola's father's behaviour caused serious concern, the Judge upheld the defence of honest opinion. She felt the Claimant's argument was "a continuation of what is clearly a highly charged family conflict".
2. The Misuse of Private Information Claim
Amazon successfully argued that Nicola's right to speak her own story and the public's right to hear it outweigh Dee's privacy rights, particularly as much of the information was already public knowledge. The Judge even went so far as to say that continued litigation "would only serve to draw further attention to the publication and reveal further and more detailed private information in open court".
Key Takeaways
It seems that this case could be the start of an increasingly common trend of judges cracking down on claims which they perceive to be simply personal grievances. Judge Allegre made this exceedingly clear in the conclusion of her judgment: "It is clear that the hurt is real on both sides, but this claim is not the right vehicle to address it."
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