Monica Leech €1.9 Million Defamation Award Explained
Jun 26th, 2009 | By Bock | Category: MediaMonica Leech won a huge amount of money in damages against the Independent for alleging that she had an affair with Martin Cullen.
€1.9 million. A staggering sum, indicating severe personal damage.
I know defamation is a difficult thing to compare with personal injuries, but still by way of curiosity, I had a look at the Injuries Board website, where they have a snappy little calculator for working out what your injury is worth. You can hover your mouse over various parts of the body and an indicative figure pops up. If you want to look into it more deeply, here’s the entire Book of Quantum.
Clearly, it seems to me, you wouldn’t sue somebody unless you believed you had been injured, whether mentally or physically, and that’s why I applaud Monica for going after every penny through the courts. Every single last penny.
Good girl, Monica. Every last penny, to ease your extreme pain.
But back to the quick compo-calculator. What’s a physical injury worth?
Well, a severe skull fracture, for instance, might be worth €129,000. A bad back injury would get you about €86,000 and a broken femur, if severe, would get you about €80,000. Bad whiplash could be worth €78,000.
Looking at the book of quantum, if you became quadriplegic, which is a pretty bad state to be in, you’d get up to about €300,000 but if you only lost both your legs, you’d get €180,000.
Monica, on the other hand, didn’t get as much as someone permanently paralysed from the neck down: €300,000.
No indeed. Monica collects €1,900,000.
I would have been interested to see what sort of money castration is worth, but for some reason, the book of quantum doesn’t deal with those kind of injuries.
The average award from the Residential Instititions Redress Board was about €60,000, and this was for a lifetime of beatings and rape, but Monica got 30 times this figure for a newspaper saying bad things about her.
Isn’t it dreadful that Monica’s distress was worse than that of a child rape victim?
There you have it.
To be wrongly accused of having an affair causes six times the distress of being totally and permanently paralysed. It creates thirty times the trauma of being raped and beaten as a child. It’s ten times as bad as losing both your legs and fifteen times as bad as having your skull smashed in.
How could that be? I wondered. After all, Monica wasn’t physically damaged at all. She was just reported as having conducted an affair which these days is hardly unusual, and certainly not likely to diminish one’s reputation. These days, in fact, to be not shagging your neighbour is a little unusual.
Nevertheless, Monica received six times as much as somebody who had been permanently paralysed from the neck down. Six times as much as a person who will never again go to the toilet on their own, and who will never again hug their children. Never walk again. Never dance.
Hmm. Could an insult in a newspaper really be so much more severe than that?
And all because this woman had been accused of having an affair?
It seemed a bit extreme, but then I remembered. She wasn’t accused of having just any old affair.
No. This poor woman was accused of conducting a sexual relationship with Martin Cullen.
Christ!
Now I can see exactly why the award was so high.
Spot on BOCK. That woman should be lauded for having put up with so much on behalf of all of us!
As a lawyer once remarked ” It is not about the money, it is all about the money”.
[Mod Edit. Comment deleted. Do you want to get me fucking sued as well?]
Sorry Bock – couldn’t resist! Hey did I miss something a couple of months back – I remember spliiting my sides laughing at one of your posts about her
Ah but the scale you have been looking at is for the lower castes.The ruling upper castes have a different scale.On the scale you checked whats a little cut on someones finger worth.Well a garda was awarded 15000 euros recently for cutting his poor little pinkie while making an arrest.Where I work I get a fucking band aid.If one of the upper caste got paralized from the neck down oh fuck the IMF would have to be called in.
Is there a bit of the million dollar hot coffee award about this?
If you remember, about a decade ago an American woman got a million dollar award because McDonalds served her scalding hot coffee. (The amount was later reduced). The Americans do things differently, so the jury were able to say publicly afterwards how they arrived at the figure. They were swayed by a defence argument that McDonald’s wouldn’t notice a small sum, and they should fine them a day’s coffee sales.
A typical out of court libel settlement is about 30K. The Herald sells about 80K copies. What’s one day’s revenue to them? Now multiply their circulation by the number of days they ran stories about her. I think the jury was less focused on Monica’s lost income than on sending a message to INM.
Anyway, the government is about to guillotine a new newspaper approved defamation bill into law, to remove the appalling vista of ordinary people decided how much a newspaper should be fined for getting it wrong. Your country is in good hands.
Mr T — It depends how you present it. My previous posts weren’t defamatory, but your comments might have been construed that way. It’s a subtle distinction, and really you should leave such decisions to me, if that’s all right.
Glad to see you are not on the same side of the fence as the Herald, and that you think the size of the award is justified, even if your logic is flawed.
You think I believe the size of the award is justified, do you?
I think the jury heard the entirety of the evidence, and made their decision on that basis, not from hearing occasional snippets that were reported in the papers. If we’re going to have juries, then we have to trust their judgment.
I initially had taken her side but then I thought to myself, she’s become the CEO of the Waterford Chamber of Commerce since the articles in question (published in 2004). She has also lost a similar case against the Independent for publishing the same comments that the Herald did, which were apparently made by some caller to the Joe Duffy show and for which she had already reached a settlement with RTE over.
Now, if her reputation was that mangled by what was said, how did she get a job as a CEO?
Well, Gerard, whatever the jury heard must have been truly awful to warrant such an award.
@Bock
You mean you really think Martin Cullen is a nice guy.after all?
My suspicion is it wasn’t what was said that mattered, but that it was said so many times over successive days.
I don’t believe that can be the criterion.
The Defamation Act of 1961 states as follows:
16.Words spoken and published which impute unchastity or adultery to any woman or girl shall not require special damage to render them actionable.
You’ll notice that this provision applies to women only, and therefore Martin Cullen or any other man would be unable to bring a similar case.
What if your a transvestitie, following the auld op? “And They’re Off”, as a tabloid headline read on a jockey that had a sex change.
That provision, if still valid, is probably unconstitutional, and even more likely to fall foul of the EDHR.
Cathy — This is a post about the amount of money awarded for different kinds of injury. Why all the anger?
Your comments have been reviewed and I’m not convinced that you were in full control of your faculties when you wrote them. To save you embarrassment, they have been removed.