Actor Noel Clarke has lost a bid to strike out the Guardian’s legal defence as his libel claim goes to trial on March 3.
The former Doctor Who star is suing Guardian News and Media (GNM) over a series of articles which said that 20 women who knew the 49-year-old actor in a professional capacity had come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct.
Mr Clarke “vehemently” denied “any sexual misconduct or wrongdoing” at the time. GNM is defending the legal action on the grounds of truth and public interest.
The actor’s lawyer, Philip Williams applied for GNM’s defence case to be struck out ahead of the full trial on Wednesday.
Mr Williams told the court in written submissions: “The claimant submits there is overwhelming evidence not just of an attempt to pervert… but actual perversion of the course of justice.”
He asserted that the “deliberate and permanent deletion” of correspondence between the journalists that investigated the claims, as well as the alleged fabrication, made it impossible for the defendant to put forward a positive case that could reasonably be believed that the “defamatory” articles were in the public interest.
GNM’s lawyers hit back that the claim was “absolutely hopeless”.
Gavin Millar KC, representing GNM, told the court that the actor’s lawyers had not pointed to any evidence supporting their claim of fabricated evidence and said there were “fatal flaws” in Mr Clarke’s case.
He said: “Litigants should not bring on applications of this exceptional nature, nor make allegations of serious criminal misconduct, without a proper evidential basis.”
Mr Millar continued that the publisher had a policy of minimising how much data it stores for data protection reasons.
“Prior to 2021, Signal did not have a feature to enable auto-delete to be the default setting for new message threads and so this would have to be enabled or actioned manually for each new thread”, he said.
Mrs Justice Steyn rejected the application, saying that written reasons for her decision would be provided at a later date.
A Guardian spokesperson said: “Today, the judge rejected Noel Clarke’s application to strike-out our defence.
“Lawyers for the Guardian told the court there is not one scintilla of evidence that journalists ‘fabricated’ evidence – a very serious claim made to launder into the public domain allegations that couldn’t have been made outside court.
“Our reporting on Noel Clarke on 2021 was based on the accounts of 20 brave women. After we published our first article, more women came forward.”
The spokesperson continued that 32 witnesses are set to testify against the actor under oath, concluding: “We look forward to a judge hearing the evidence.”
