People editor applauds kiss and tell ruling

Jessica Hodgson
guardian.co.uk, Friday February 15 2002 17.43 GMT

Theakston: is known mostly for his work on the BBC

Neil Wallis, the editor of the Sunday People, has welcomed a high court ruling allowing prostitutes to kiss and tell in the press, saying it shows the law is "not a plaything of the rich and famous".

Mr Justice Ousely said yesterday that celebrities who actively court publicity about their private lives cannot complain when they receive publicity that is less than favourable.

The judge banned the People from printing photographs of TV presenter Jamie Theakston taken inside the brothel but allowed the paper to run an article based on interviews with prostitutes.

Wallis said: "At last we've got a judge who is prepared to say that press freedom is about more than the right of wealthy celebrities to pay the law to condone their unpleasant behaviour."

He said the ruling backed the principle that "you can't put your life into the public arena and take it back again when it suits you".

Wallis added: "The judge makes clear that if you go to a prostitute they have a right to have their story heard as well."

Theakston's position as a role model for young people laid him open to scrutiny, Wallis argued.

"This is a man who fronted a safe sex campaign and then went and frolicked in a dungeon with three prostitutes.

"If your whole career is based around appealing to young people then you de facto become a role model," the editor asserted.

Mr Ouseley yesterday went public on his reasons for denying Theakston an injunction on an article based on interviews with the prostitutes.

He said the law of confidentiality should not be judged from the point of view of one participant and the prostitutes had as great a right as Theakston to decide on his right to confidentiality.

"The prostitutes clearly took a different view of the confidentiality of what they had seen and done. It is not inherent in the nature of a brothel that anything that transpires within is confidential," said the judge.

The ruling comes in the same week as two major legal cases, which are regarded as tests for the new privacy provisions under the Human Rights Act.

The People went to the court of appeal yesterday to try to lift a ban on exposing the sexual affairs of a top Premiership footballer in a landmark case on the right to privacy.

The case, presided over by England's top judge, the lord chief justice, Lord Woolf, is expected to clarify the extent to which the Human Rights Act has created a new right, apart from the existing law of confidence, to keep the details of a person's private life secret.

The married footballer, who won a high court injunction last September barring kiss and tell stories by two women, claims he has a right under the longstanding law of confidence to keep his sex secrets under wraps.

Under that law, certain relationships, such as marriage and long-term sexual relationships, carry a duty of confidentiality - but it is unclear how far transient relationships are protected.

This week model Naomi Campbell was in the high court to sue the Mirror for publishing an article entitled: "Naomi: I am a drug addict."

Campbell is claiming the Mirror breached her privacy by running the article, which showed photographs of her emerging from a Narcotics Anonymous clinic.