\n<\/p>\n
The green energy entrepreneur and Labour donor Dale Vince is in line to receive damages from the publisher of the Daily Mail after claiming it used his picture to mislead millions of readers.<\/p>\n
Vince, who has given more than \u00a35m to Labour over several years, took legal action against Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL) over an article, published in June 2023, headlined \u201cLabour repays \u00a3100,000 to sex pest donor\u201d.<\/p>\n
The donor referred to in the headline was not Vince, but his picture accompanied the article. The pictures showed Vince holding a Just Stop Oil banner.<\/p>\n
The high court initially threw out Vince\u2019s data protection claim against the newspaper over the article. That decision has been overturned by the court of appeal.<\/p>\n
The Mail\u2019s headline actually referred to the fact that Labour was repaying money to a former donor, Davide Serra. In 2002, an employment tribunal heard that Serra had made sexist comments to a female colleague, which were found to amount to unlawful harassment related to sex.<\/p>\n
The pictures of Vince were published in print, where the headline referred to a \u201c\u2018sex harassment\u2019 donor\u201d, and on the Mail+ app. They were changed online to photographs depicting Serra 47 minutes after the story\u2019s publication, but the original pictures of Vince remained in the print edition.<\/p>\n
Vince argued that the article unfairly used his personal data and that the photos would lead many readers to believe that he had been accused of sexual harassment.<\/p>\n
Throughout the legal arguments in the case, ANL\u2019s lawyers argued that the full context of the article and pictures was clear to anyone who read the whole headline and story. Serra was identified as the subject of the headline early on in the piece.<\/p>\n
ANL had also argued that Vince\u2019s data claim was also an attempt to \u201cresurrect\u201d a libel action against the Mail in 2024 for the same story. A high court judge initially threw out the data protection claim in June last year.<\/p>\n
However, that decision has now been overturned by three court of appeal judges. In a 20-page ruling, the judge, Sir Geoffrey Vos, said Vince was trying to seek redress for \u201can obvious injustice perpetrated by a wrongdoer who was taking every possible legal point against him\u201d.<\/p>\n
Vos said ANL had \u201cfailed to take care not to publish misleading information and images in the articles\u201d, as required by the editors\u2019 code of practice adopted by the Independent Press Standards Organisation, of which ANL is a member.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe information in the headline juxtaposed next to the images of Mr Vince would have misled many casual readers into thinking that Mr Vince was the \u2018sex harassment donor\u2019 referred to in the headline,\u201d he said, adding that ANL had \u201cno real prospect\u201d of defending Vince\u2019s damages claim.<\/p>\n
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Sign up to Headlines UK<\/span><\/p>\n Get the day\u2019s headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Responding to the ruling, Vince claimed that it would have far-reaching implications for media coverage.<\/p>\n \u201cThe fallacy at the heart of libel law is the assumption that people read both headlines and articles in full,\u201d he said. \u201cWe all know this is not true; we all scan headlines and think we know what the story is.<\/p>\n \u201cBut that element of libel law has stood for over three decades, while the internet grew, social media came into the world, and our attention spans famously shrank. Libel law in our country is not fit for purpose. It needs updating for the modern era.\u201d<\/p>\n ANL declined to comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The green energy entrepreneur and Labour donor Dale Vince is in line to receive damages from the publisher of the Daily Mail after claiming it used his picture to mislead millions of readers. Vince, who has given more than \u00a35m to Labour over several years, took legal action against Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL) over an<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51164,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[14018,510,731,7208,7478,2670,17095,732],"class_list":{"0":"post-51163","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-article","9":"tag-daily","10":"tag-dale","11":"tag-damages","12":"tag-mail","13":"tag-misleading","14":"tag-publisher","15":"tag-vince"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51163\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/51164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}