CA-2024-001499 - [2025] EWCA Civ 1321

This was handed down following submissions made some three months after the judgment on liability. In addressing damages the judge identified the relevant legal principles by reference to Barron v Vines (above) and other authorities. She recognised that she was now evaluating the extent of the reputational harm caused by Mr Fox’s tweets (“calibrating quantum”, as she put it) but also had to compensate for distress and must award a sum sufficient to achieve appropriate vindication. The need for vindication required an award that would “convince a fair-minded bystander of the utter baselessness of these libels.”

The judge considered the gravity of the libel. She repeated her earlier findings and added that the allegation was “a particularly powerful reputational pollutant” with an “exceptionally adhesive and ‘non-incredible’ quality”. She considered the extent of publication, describing this as “a mass publication case” not just because of Mr Fox’s large Twitter following, and the evidence of substantial percolation on social media, but also because the paedophile allegations were “picked up and discussed in the national edited media”. The claimants’ republication of Mr Fox’s tweets “did not materially add to or detract from the impact by scale of publication”.

The judge considered the claimants’ vulnerability to reputational harm caused by this libel. She found this was “exacerbated by their national profile on LGBTQ+ issues and the safeguarding matters engaged by their respective livelihoods” . Although Mr Fox’s tweet had not caused the later drag queen controversy involving Mr Seymour it had “enhanced his vulnerability to reputational harm of that nature”. The evidence did not point to quantifiable career damage; the claimants had received workplace and media support so that their worst fears about direct professional impact were not realised. But the judge took into account that they had encountered “jeopardy” and the need to take mitigation action.

The judge considered whether “the calumny itself was widely accepted as true fact”. She found that the evidence fell short of establishing that this was so. But, she said, “something a long way short of absolute conviction in the minds of third parties is entirely capable of creating deep reputational stain” as well as acute personal distress about what people might be thinking.

The judge considered whether steps taken by Mr Fox after publication of the libels had a bearing on quantum. She said – reflecting her previous findings - that his public statements of 2020 were focused on airing his grievance at having been called a racist and justifying his own behaviour. They did not amount to an unqualified retraction of the libel, or an apology. She made similar findings about the apology Mr Fox made from the witness box on day 5 of the trial. There remained a need for vindication through an award of damages. But the judge took into account in Mr Fox’s favour that he “took down and did not repeat the libel, and went at least some way to distancing himself from it”. She also acknowledged that he had not asserted the truth of the allegations or a belief in their truth.

The judge found that the claimants’ subjective experience of being libelled was of a “shocking and humiliating public ordeal”. They had faced the twin terrors of “blaring public and publicised controversy” (including “vicious hate speech”) and fear of what people might be thinking. The judge rejected Mr Green KC’s submission that the claimants had brushed off, or even relished and capitalised on, the experience. She rejected his further submission that “the claimants brought this ordeal upon themselves” in any material way. They had not on any fair analysis invited the response Mr Fox visited upon them. They had been forced to fight a libel claim all the way to trial “with every single conceivable point being taken against them”. They had also been “forced to deal with counterclaims of precisely the kind that Parliament intended, in passing section 1 of the Defamation Act 2013, to deter”. They had done so amid a “sustained hailstorm of Mr Fox’s exercise of his rights of amplified free speech”.

The judge held that in all the circumstances a substantial award of damages was “inevitable” to achieve the purposes she had identified. In arriving at a figure she had regard to “the broad pattern of awards” revealed by cases that had been cited to her as comparators. The sum of £90,000 each was broadly in line with the pattern of awards. It was necessary and sufficient “to supply the balance of the full reputational vindication” to which the claimants were entitled and to compensate them for the damage and distress unlawfully inflicted upon them.