Author Gives Up On McKennitt UK Privacy Case

Niema Ash, the author who wrote a ‘kiss and tell’ book about Canadian singer-songwriter Loreena McKennitt has given up on her attempt to publish a second edition of the book that would have eliminated portions of the original book that a High Court judge ruled violated privacy rules.

The House of Lords, the UKs highest court, had refused to accept an appeal of the original judgment that had been upheld by the Court of Appeals that said parts of the book were based on events that had occurred in private and therefore the book should not be distributed. The Lords, in refusing the case, had said the case “did not raise an arguable point of law of general public importance.”

That means the basic point of the lower court stands and that the media and authors need to be careful in their kiss and tell stories in future. The Ash case is seen as a precedent that everyone in the UK has the right to expect that events that occur in private remain private, even if one is a celebrity, and that could well put a crimp in the how tabloids tell their kiss and tell stories.

McKennitt’s lawyer told the High Court last week that Ash was withdrawing the book and had agreed to make a payment towards McKennitt’s costs. In the UK it is usual that the losing side in a civil case pay the legal costs of both sides.

But just as British libel law is seen far stricter than it is on the other side of the Atlantic, so it also appears with privacy law, for the book, with all of the offending passages has already been published in the US and Canada.

Nevertheless, McKennitt said in a statement, “I passionately believe that if an aspect of one’s career places one directly in the public eye or if extraordinary events make an ordinary person newsworthy for a time, we all still should have the basic human dignity of privacy for our home and family life. At the end of this long process, privacy law has been developed and built upon…. This was never a case about suppressing journalistic investigation of matters of genuine public interest, but about protection from publication of deeply intrusive material about my private life and my private grief.”

In the UK, at least. - Philip Stone September 11, 2007

Keywords:privacy law

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