A libel action against the Newcastle Evening Chronicle has been settled out of court by two nursery nurses wrongly accused of child abuse in a council report.
This is the full statement on the matter by Chronicle editor Paul Robertson.

CHRISTOPHER LILLIE AND DAWN REED

As readers will know in the last few days, much coverage has rightly been given to the successful libel action brought by Christopher Lillie and Dawn Reed against Newcastle City Council and the four members of the independent Review Team, who wrote “Abuse in Early Years”. The comments made by Mr Justice Eady about the motives of the authors of the report have also been highlighted, and the Evening Chronicle has, of course, reported all these developments in full.

Unfortunately, some reports about the Evening Chronicle’s involvement in this matter have been less than accurate and so I am issuing this statement to try and clarify the position.

Like virtually every other news-gathering organisation, the Evening Chronicle was notified by the Council and the Review Team that “Abuse in Early Years” would be made public at a Council meeting on November 12th 1998. We were invited to attend that meeting of the Council and also to Press Conferences which would be held immediately afterwards by the council leader and Professor Richard Barker, the Chairman of the Review Team. Evening Chronicle reporters attended the meetings and readers will remember that we gave full coverage to these crucial and very important events.

Like everyone else, we had no reason whatsoever to doubt the findings of the Review Team, at the time the report was issued. We did not know that the report was completely wrong, we did not know (to use the words of Mr Justice Eady) that the Review Team lacked “fairness and humanity”, we did not know that the report itself contained a very large number of falsehoods which the Judge has identified, and we certainly did not know that the members of the Review Team were motivated by malice against Mr Lillie and Miss Reed.

In the following ten months, the Chronicle reported on a large number of different developments, but everything we published was based on the Review Team’s fundamental, but incorrect, finding that Mr Lillie and Miss Reed were guilty of child abuse.

At the end of 1999, Mr Lillie and Miss Reed started two libel actions: one was against the Evening Chronicle and one was against the City Council and the four members of the Review Team.

The Chronicle defended the case on the basis either that the allegations were true (because at the time, we had no reason to doubt the accuracy of the report or the motives of its authors) or if the allegations were not true, we had published the articles under the protection of Qualified Privilege. This is a legal defence and is intended to encourage freedom of expression by protecting publishers from libel actions where matters of great public importance are being reported upon, in good faith in the public interest, and without malice.

The trial started in January of this year with the two actions being heard simultaneously by Mr Justice Eady. The Judge had previously decided that the issues were too complex and the trial likely to last for too long, to justify the cases being decided by a Jury.

After six weeks or so, the Evening Chronicle’s QC was contacted by the QC for Mr Lillie and Miss Reed. Our QC was told that Mr Lillie and Miss Reed were prepared to settle the claim against the Evening Chronicle if we made a contribution to their legal costs, promised not to repeat the allegations contained in “Abuse in Early Years”, and promised to report the outcome of the case against the Council and the Review Team.

As anyone who has ever been involved in litigation will know, predicting the outcome of a High Court trial is very difficult, no matter how optimistic you are about the strength of your case. The Chronicle and its lawyers were always confident that the technical defence of Qualified Privilege would succeed, but as nothing is ever certain in litigation, we decided to accept the offer. The reason for doing so was that we were only being asked to contribute to the costs of Mr Lillie and Miss Reed: we were not asked to pay their costs in full, we were not asked to apologise for repeating the Review Team’s false allegations, and we were not being asked to pay any damages.

As a result, the case against the Evening Chronicle was discontinued by Mr Lillie and Miss Reed on February 27, 2002.

In the last few days, we have reported the outcome of the case against the Council and the Review Team in detail, as we promised to do. Even if this had not been part of the settlement of the claim against us, we would have reported it. The Review Team perpetrated a gross miscarriage of justice on Mr Lillie and Miss Reed by making these false allegations against them, and we had unknowingly contributed to that process by publishing details of the report. Mr Lillie and Miss Reed had been greatly wronged, and when Mr Justice Eady held that they were totally innocent, it went without saying that we had a moral obligation to them and to our readers to report this important decision.

The Evening Chronicle was innocently caught up in the Review Team’s malicious campaign against Mr Lillie and Miss Reed, and in the light of the terms of the settlement of their action against the Chronicle, we think that Mr Lillie and Miss Reed recognised this.

To use the words of Mr Justice Eady, this whole affair has cost the people of Newcastle a vast amount of money and years of unnecessary heartache to many of those involved.

We will continue to seek answers for this whole sorry affair and to report them responsibly.

Paul Robertson,
Editor
Evening Chronicle, Newcastle.

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