KB-2025-000232 - [2025] EWHC 1784 (KB)

Ms Miller accepted that she had shared the trial bundle for this hearing with Ms Gauntlett shortly after receiving it from Mr Ness. Ms Miller said she did so because she wanted Ms Gauntlett to provide a witness statement in these proceedings and she wanted to check certain points regarding one of the documents. (I mention for completeness that Ms Miller indicated that Ms Gauntlett declined to provide a witness statement.) Ms Miller said the first time she had spoken to Ms Gauntlett was after she learnt that Mr Ness had obtained a witness summons for her to attend Court. She said she knew how stressful these proceedings were and she was concerned for Ms Gauntlett’s wellbeing and so she called her at the telephone number that was in one of the unredacted England Athletics emails;

Mr Ness put to Ms Miller that a passage in the First Email where Ms Gauntlett said, “I’m told yet another police investigation is currently ongoing for his continuing threatening behaviour towards members of the public”, was a reference to information that the Defendant had provided to her about her police complaint, which had been made earlier that same day. Ms Miller accepted she made a police complaint on 10 February 2024, but denied having any communication with Ms Gauntlett about this. She said that as she was not involved in the content of the email, she could not comment upon what this passage meant. She added, “I don’t know how she found that out” and then suggested that it might be through “Chinese whispers”;

Ms Miller rejected Mr Ness’ suggestion that she had objected to him obtaining a witness summons for Ms Gauntlett because there were things that she preferred to keep hidden. She said she had objected to all of the witness summonses for the reasons set out in her 17 June 2025 communication to the Court, namely that the Claimant had not provided witness statements for any of the three summonsed individuals, so that the relevance and content of what they would say was unknown;

A 16 March 2024 tweet from an anonymous account on X from “MVolunteer@76” was put to Ms Miller. Mr Ness suggested that this was posted by Ms Gauntlett. Ms Miller responded that she was unable to comment on this and that she had no knowledge of this account or its tweets at the time;

Mr Ness put to Ms Miller that the reference in the Fifth Email to his bail conditions must have come from her. At the time when the email was sent, he was still in police custody (following his arrest earlier that day) and had yet to be notified of his bail conditions. He suggested that as she was one of the complainants, Ms Miller had been informed of the bail conditions by the police. Ms Miller denied having any direct contact with Ms Gauntlett on this topic. She said that North Wales Police had telephoned her to inform her that Mr Ness had been arrested. The officer had asked her to attend the police station to provide some further documentation, which she had done that day (8 March 2024). She said she went to the station at about midday and, whilst there, she did ask questions of the officers, but was told that there was very little they could say about the arrest. She did not recall being told about the bail conditions. Ms Miller added that she had mentioned to Michelle and Joanna Sojka that the Claimant had been arrested and she had also told a couple of other people who had messaged her to check that she was alright. She reiterated that she had had no direct contact with Ms Gauntlett and that if Ms Gauntlett had received any information regarding this it must have come through “Chinese whispers”;

Ms Miller denied Mr Ness’ suggestion that she was the source of a reference in the penultimate paragraph of the earlier email sent on 8 March 2024 (para 39 above) where Ms Gauntlett said she had been “told” about a police report being filed against the Claimant in Kent;

Ms Miller did not accept Mr Ness’s suggestion that there was an inconsistency between the latter part of para 5 of her 26 June 2025 statement, where she had referred to the “emails that include details of my police complaint” (para 47 above) and the oral evidence she had given disputing a link between her police complaint and Ms Gauntlett’s emails; and

More generally, Ms Miller denied Mr Ness’ contention that she was the co-ordinator of a group who had actively set out to defame him and which included Ms Gauntlett amongst a number of anonymous participants.