Rupert Murdoch’s news publisher in the UK agreed to pay “substantial damages” to a man wrongly arrested for a high-profile murder, after apologising for the invasion of his privacy.
Christopher Jefferies, a retired schoolteacher and landlord from Bristol, was wrongfully arrested in 2010 for the murder of Joanna Yeates, a landscape architect.
He took legal action against News Group Newspapers (NGN), which publishes the Sun, in 2022 over alleged voicemail interception. NGN also published the News of the World, which was closed after the phone-hacking scandal.
It has now emerged in court that Jefferies and NGN settled a claim at the high court in November 2024. News UK, the parent company of NGN, said the settlement was made on the basis of the invasion of Jefferies’ privacy by the News of the World.
NGN agreed to pay damages, but the court was told it did so with “no admission of liability in relation to the claimant’s allegations of voicemail interception and/or other unlawful information gathering at the Sun”.
Lurid stories about Jefferies and his life regularly appeared in the press after it emerged that Yeates, who disappeared in December 2010, had been his tenant. She was later found dead.
Jefferies was initially arrested by police and held in custody for three days. However, he was found to have no connection to the crime. Vincent Tabak, a Dutch engineer who had lived in the UK since 2007, was eventually jailed for a minimum of 20 years after being found guilty of the murder.
Jefferies claimed that NGN had published private information about his life throughout most of 2011. The court was told the articles relating to him “had a damaging and long-lasting effect on him and his private life, including his standing in the community and to his relationships with some friends”.
Mariyam Kamil, a Matrix Chambers barrister for NGN, said: “The defendant is here today, through me, to offer its apologies to Mr Jefferies for the distress caused to him by the invasion of his privacy by individuals working for or on behalf of the News of the World.
“The defendant acknowledges that such activity should never have taken place and that it had no right to intrude into Mr Jefferies’s private life in this way.”
It marks the latest vindication for Jefferies. While police insisted they had been right to arrest him, they apologised in 2013 for not making it clear sooner that he was innocent.
Jefferies was arrested and questioned for two days after the body of 25-year-old Yeates was found on Christmas Day in 2010. Tabak was charged with Yeates’s murder three weeks later, but Jefferies remained on police bail until March 2011.
The chief constable of Avon and Somerset police, Nick Gargan, said arresting Jefferies had been an “integral step” in the inquiry, but accepted that once he had been released from bail, the force should have considered making it clear in public he was innocent.
Speaking in 2012, Jefferies said he had been the victim of a “character assassination” by some of the media. He said he had been presented as a “dark, macabre, sinister villain … a lewd figure … a peeping Tom”.
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