Out-Law News 2 min. read

Brothel-visiting celebrity remains anonymous after Moseley precedent


The Sun newspaper has refused to name a top football manager it said it caught leaving a brothel. Privacy law experts say that the case underlines the strictness with which courts interpret the right to privacy of famous people.

The Sun said that it confronted a Premier League football manager outside a Thai-style massage parlour and asked him if he knew that the premises operated as a brothel. He is said to have smiled and said 'yes'. The manager is married with children, The Sun said.

While a very public figure engaged in such activity might have been expected to be named in the past, privacy law experts have said that following the rulings in the Max Moseley case such naming is becoming increasingly rare.

Formula 1 boss Moseley was the subject of a News of the World story and online video which depicted sex sessions he was engaged in with women whom he had paid. He was awarded a £60,000 payout for invasion of his privacy by the High Court in 2008 after the News of the World failed in its public interest defence that the session was based on Nazi fantasies.

Privacy law expert Rosemary Jay of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW.COM, said that the football manager story is representative of a change in thinking following not just the Moseley ruling but others that preceded it.

"This is a change, but I don't think it's just Moseley," said Jay. "There has been a gradual tightening of the screw."

Media commentator Stephen Glover has written that he understands that the paper was keen to name the man but that lawyers representing him threatened to seek a court injunction preventing publication.

The European Convention on Human Rights guarantees people a right to a private life and in many recent cases this has been upheld by the courts as a general right of privacy.

"There has been a gradual stepping up of cases where the courts have said there is an area of private activity, where there is not a public interest in publication," said Jay. "And in this case: what is the public interest in disclosing that a Premiership manager may have visited a brothel?"

Jay said that newspapers now have to think more carefully about what justification they will use if they do name and shame public figures.

"This restricts the public interest defence to things that are genuinely in the public interest so that it can't be used as a cloak for disclosing private information gratuitously," said Jay. "Max Moseley's was clearly a watershed case in this area, and is part of a bigger movement."

The High Court said in the Moseley case that the fact that the married Moseley was behaving in a way that offended conventional morals was not justification for publication.

"[Moseley] had a reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to sexual activities (albeit unconventional) carried on between consenting adults on private property," said Mr Justice Eady in that ruling.

The News of the World had tried to argue that there was a public interest in publication because the event was a Nazi-themed orgy. Moseley is the son of Oswald Moseley, the leader of the British fascists in the 1930s and '40s.

When the paper's star witness, one of the women, failed to give evidence, the Court found that the Nazi link was unproven.

"There was no public interest or other justification for the clandestine recording, for the publication of the resulting information and still photographs, or for the placing of the video extracts on the News of the World website – all of this on a massive scale," said the ruling.

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