Do the laws need to change to prevent celebrities silencing those less powerful? | The News Agents

It's about the right of, in this case, women, to be able to tell their own stories. You know, this is about the most fundamental mismatch of power, in the sense that... We often talk about this as a contest, as I say, between a celebrity's privacy and a newspaper's freedom or a journalist's freedom. The third party are women whose accounts are silenced, right? And the real difficult thing for me about this, and I think we really need a big conversation about the legal framework about privacy in this country, and about celebrity and powerful people's ability to use the law and the courts. To not just say what they want to say, but to prevent other people from being able to narrate and tell the truth about their own lives, right? And that is something that's quite peculiar to Britain. You know, most other countries, you mentioned the United States, John, you wouldn't get away with this in the US because they've got the First Amendment. Our libel laws, our laws around defamation, our laws around right to privacy are hopelessly out of date. And a right to privacy. cannot automatically become a right to control somebody else's account of their own life. And okay, we got to the right outcome here, but only because the parties involved were willing to spend millions of pounds over the years to get this case to court and eventually win. Most ordinary people do not have that luxury and do not have those resources, so we need to review this very urgently. I think there is an asymmetry. In our law, which tends to be more concerned that a man would be wrongly accused than that a woman who is telling the truth could take her own life if she isn't able to talk about that. And, you know, the fact that the judge in this case just came out and said, I'm not a specialist in suicidal ideation. I'll leave that to the therapist. Thanks very much. I can only tell you whether this is, you know, lawful, legal. And you cannot be trying to silence a truth coming out or an allegation coming out, let's say, because somebody might be about to take their own life.