I’m not defending injunctions, but the idea that celebrities’s only defence against excessive snoopng is to be as normative as possible is just a restatement of the anti privacy slogan, ‘if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear’.
We should all have some right to a private personal life. Hypothetically, if an individual had experience with a reasonable fear that an aggressive tabloid press night use homophobia to ruin their career, they might be inclined to be proactive in regards to injunctions.
A couple of years ago some previously anonymous school teacher became a favourite Ripon of the daily mail just because she transitioned to female over a school holiday. This was a purely personal decision, obviously, but the mail decided it should end her career. Indeed, she ended her life shortly afterwards. The press is not going to self regulate. Whatever regulation they are subject to should be more accessible and transparent, such that the possibility of fines for reporting on private lives leads them to self-restraint.
@doctorow, it’s not a super-injunction, it’s just an injunction. The press aren’t even allowed to report on the existence of a super-injunction, which is obviously not what’s happening here.
Well, I was assuming that contempt of court was a criminal offence even if the injunction arose from a civil suit (IANAL), but I think the point works either way. If papers automatically published any name they were ordered not to reveal, then neither the state nor Elton John would want these injunctions to keep being issued.
I also live in the UK, and that’s why I make a point of mentioning the names (otherwise, ironically, I’d respect their privacy). It’s farcical to pretend that courts are willing or able to lock up the entire population over this, and it’s only the pretence that makes it seem like courts have the power to order any such thing.
Whether accurate or not (I do not know English law), the original article made the distinction:
Injunction - binding on a party to a suit
Superinjunction - binding on not only the parties, but on everyone else
Hyperinjuction - binding on everyone and equipped with a gag order.
The third is Kafkaesque - because people who are not parties to the suit and discover the facts independently can be held in contempt for publishing them - but are not on notice that publishing them is forbidden. You are not allowed to find out what you cannot say, but you still cannot say it.
I feel very sorry for Singh but he wasn’t careful enough. He had the misfortune to use a word which spelt £££ to the legal profession, and his publication wasn’t vetted as it would have been by a newspaper. That said, the Streisand effect may have meant that a certain organisation saw a large fall in demand for its product. They were insufficiently intelligent simply to drown him in positive PR.
Oliver Wendell Holmes used to be very good at this with his “I am sure the people concerned in this enterprise are totally sincere” and the like. His piece on phrenology is brilliant.
Essentially - in the internet age these laws have no effect - My wife heard-tell of this “new” injunction, within 5 mins I could tell her the name of all the parties and what they “allegedly” got up to.
She regrets her actions that led to forming a mental picture she now cannot forget.
Fortunately, so long as we don’t leave the EU, this would be struck down by the European Court.
I don’t know how to feel about this. It’s stupid. Because of the injunction I spent a minute figuring out who it was. But the fact is if it weren’t for the injunction I would have heard about it anyway. I’d have seen it over someone’s shoulder on the subway or it would have been on someone’s news feed or trending on twitter, or even on the CBC front page (maybe in some once-removed format like an editorial about the privacy questions raised by celebrity sex scandals with a big picture of Elton John).
Fame is kind of antithetical to privacy. It’s a real cost paid by the famous. That’s not an injustice I’m up in arms about, though.
To be honest, I’m an ignorant American regarding the intricacies of relations between the Irish and the English. I know some of the history, but Guy Fawkes is not a famous person to most Americans. In my travels and working abroad, I have learned that he is 1) a caricatured face on the Anonymous masks, 2) a reason for bonfires on November 5th, and 3) a (traitorous? patriotic? not sure) bomber of Parliament. I could look up more, but I’m really not bothered either way.
I agree, it isn’t right. But it is reality. We can work to change such things, but acknowledging that they exist is the first step.
Just don’t say that in Boston on St. Patrick’s day.
Is it Elton Hockney or David John? I can never tell them apart and you never see both of them in the same place at the same time.
The English judiciary is largely drawn from the people who spent a lot of time in the debating clubs at their private schools and Oxford. They had servants to deal with everyday reality. What do you expect?
My favorite example of a British headline about the “celebrity threesome” was The Guardian’s “The Injunction is Back.” I imagine some poor intern stayed up all night trying to fit “injunction” into a certain UK singer’s song titles, with the caveat that it couldn’t be too obvious. (“No, Carl, we can’t use Saturday Night’s All Right For Injunctions. Try again.”)
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