‘I really don’t want to live in a world where people get bullied off their stories’
In April 2021, the Guardian published an investigation alleging that the actor Noel Clarke had used his power in the film and TV industry to harass women and commit acts of sexual misconduct. Clarke sued Guardian News and Media for libel and what followed was a five-week trial that concluded in the High Court, with the judgment published in August 2025, bringing a four year legal battle to conclusion. Guardian News and Media won the case, heard before Mrs Justice Steyn, who stated that “The Guardian has succeeded in establishing both truth and public interest defences to the libel claim” [1023]. The articles in the investigation into Clarke were co-authored by Lucy Osborne and Sirin Kale. You can read more about the case here.
We spoke to Ms. Kale about the trial, the threats of legal letters and the importance of best practice journalism and standing by your story.
While the story was published in April 2021, there had been intense work before publication, including verifying sources, making sure that there was public interest in the story, fact-checking and corroborating information, which Ms. Kale says is imperative: “Pre-publication, we carefully considered the public interest that we were reporting, so leaving out details that we thought were unnecessary, often relating to someone’s personal life. We had really extensive documents that contained a long list of people we had spoken with to verify certain aspects of our story.”
She emphasised the importance of making sure that you “speak to everyone you can because you have to be really clear and confident in what you’re saying.” Ms. Kale also stated that “you have a responsibility to the truth and the facts” and that journalists might feel uncomfortable when asking sources if they have any evidence, but that it is important to do so because proof is important. Ms. Kale stated not to be worried about asking for such evidence: “I am always very straight and say ‘this doesn’t mean that I don’t believe you, it just means that I need some proof’ and ask if they have anything and really, people are fine to provide that because if a person is being truthful they normally expect that they are going to be asked to provide some evidence to substantiate their claims.” With regard to the stories surrounding Clarke, Ms. Kale described how they would ask their sources to “tell us what happened repeatedly and we would just listen really carefully to see if any aspect of their story changed or if any aspect didn’t ring true or didn’t feel real or believable, and their stories never changed, even down to very small details.”
It was after reaching out to Clarke and asking him to comment on the allegations when the legal letter was sent and, while the Guardian “receives threatening legal letters often”, this legal letter was particularly long: “I can’t remember how long the legal letter was, but it was pretty remarkable how long it actually was and it became really clear from reading it that he was going to deny everything.” Indeed, when the legal letter came back, Ms. Kale stated how important it is that you engage with any points or claims that are being made as best practice journalism:
“When it gets to the point where they are threatening legal action against you as a journalist, the intention there is often to intimidate you away from the story, but you need to engage with what they are saying really carefully. When Clarke came back to us with his very long legal letter, he made claims in that letter that we as responsible reporters had to go out and interrogate so that meant that we went back to our sources and did further reporting. So you have to keep an open mind. If someone comes back to you with a legal letter and are making factual points that are disputing the version of events you are intending on publishing then you have a responsibility to listen to that and to take it on board.”
Threatening legal letters are, unfortunately, a common practice that the Guardian sees all too often, but Ms. Kale states that she hopes that the fact that the Guardian won their defence against Clarke emphasises just how important it is to stand by public interest journalism. “I hope that it gives other editors the strength to do what our editor Katharine Viner did, which is to defend journalism in court because there’s often a reluctance to do that because of the fear of reputational impact or losing and having to pay damages. So often there is pressure to settle pre-trial, do a deal, take the articles down and give them money and it goes away.”
However, Ms. Kale is keen to emphasise that if you believe in your story and have done all of the work to ensure that it is true and accurate and in the public interest then you should stand by it, offering final words of advice about the importance of publishing these stories.
“These letters are really scary. I have received them. But if you believe the story is true, trust your sources, have fact-checked it, corroborated it, spoken to everyone you possibly can, given an opportunity to respond and listened carefully to the response and you still feel that the story is a) true and b) in the public interest then you should report it. I really don’t want to live in a world where people get bullied off their stories. It is not our job as journalists to publish stories that make people happy all the time. Sometimes, unfortunately, people are not going to be happy with what you publish, but I would rather live in that world than the world where people just back away from difficult stories.”