Dyson Fails To Blow Away MGN

Defamation cases are difficult to succeed with partly due to the requirement introduced by the Defamation Act 2013 for the Claimant to be able to establish serious harm caused by the comments complained about.

The prospect of succeeding is hampered further where the statement is one of opinion, as a Defendant in such a claim may seek to rely upon the statutory defence of honest opinion. These two issues were considered in the final trial in the case of Sir James Dyson v MGN Ltd [2023].

Background

The Claimant is a well-known inventor and businessman behind the Dyson products, which include hoovers and fans, amongst other things. What is also pertinent for this case is that the Claimant is also responsible for creating the Dyson Institute for Engineering and Technology, a magnet for promising talent in this discipline. The Defendant is a news group that publishes The Daily Mirror and the online publication The Mirror.

In January 2022, Mr Reade published an article headlined:

Whilst the article was not directly targeted at the Claimant, it does refer to him in two paragraphs of the article. The natural and ordinary meaning of these offending paragraphs was determined by Mr Justice Nicklin at an earlier hearing in this case as being:

The judge concluded that paragraph (a) above, was a statement of fact that was not defamatory but that (b) had a defamatory meaning and was a statement of opinion. The matter proceeded to final trial in December 2023, where the Court had to determine whether the Claimant had sustained serious harm as a result of the article and, if so, whether the Defendant could avail itself of the honest opinion defence.

The judge found in favour of the Defendant on both of these grounds. In respect of serious harm, the Claimant was not able to point to any financial losses arising from the article. Indeed, the evidence before the Court appeared to demonstrate an increase in turnover/profit in the UK since the article was published. The Claimant therefore asked the Court to draw an inference that serious harm had been sustained.

Whilst accepting that it is possible for there to be an inference of serious harm in a defamation case, upon considering the facts in this case, the judge was not willing to infer serious harm, relying upon, amongst other things, earlier published articles of others along similar lines to the offending article are likely to have caused more harm than the article in this case and accordingly the judge was not willing to accept that the offending article had caused sufficient damage to the Claimant’s reputation over and above the state of affairs prior to its publication to surmount the serious harm threshold.

The Claimant’s claim would have failed on the serious harm test alone, but the judge analysed whether the Defendant’s defence of honest opinion would have succeeded in any event and found that it would have done. In doing so, the judge found that extraneous facts outside of those mentioned in the offending comment could be taken into account, but that in this specific case, these were not sufficient to affect whether the meaning of the offending comment was true or not.

Comment

This case demonstrates clearly how difficult it is to run an inferential case in respect of serious harm. A Claimant should therefore proceed with caution if he/she has not incurred clear and direct harm as a result of any comments made. An example of where an inferential claim may well succeed could be where there has been a campaign of false negative reviews against a company by a third party. Whilst it would be difficult to tie the company’s performance to the comments made, dependent on the content of the posts, a judge may be willing to find that the serious harm test has been fulfilled in those circumstances.