THE JOURNALIST WHO BROKE CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA WAS THANKED WITH A £1 MILLION LEGAL BILL
Carole Cadwalladr
@carolecadwalla exposed one of the biggest political scandals in modern British history. Cambridge Analytica. Brexit dark money. Possible Russian influence in UK democracy. The kind of journalism that wins Pulitzer nominations and keeps people in power very nervous.
So what happened next?
Arron Banks the man who made the biggest single political donation in UK history at around £9 million to Brexit campaigns, sued her personally. Not The
@observer , which published her work for years. Not
@TEDTalks, which hosted her talk. Her. Individually. A freelance journalist.
The suit was over one sentence in a 2019 TED Talk and a single tweet, in which she said Banks had lied about a secret relationship with the Russian government. Banks denied it. He had, however, admitted meeting Russian embassy officials multiple times more than he originally told a Parliamentary committee.
@guardian, her own publisher, declined to fund her defence.
She crowdfunded her legal costs from 29,000 members of the public.
She faced potential costs of up to £1 million. She eventually won on the main issues in the High Court in 2022, but lost on appeal on one narrow point.
She was ordered to pay Banks £35,000 in damages, issue an apology, and delete certain tweets. She was also hit with a costs order of over £1 million.
The woman who exposed how democracy gets bought had to beg the public for money to stay solvent while doing it.
Seventeen press freedom organisations called the case an attempt to intimidate and silence public interest journalism. The UK government eventually introduced anti-SLAPP legislation. Partly because of what happened to her.
In the UK, you can crowdfund a journalist's survival costs after she exposes the possible corruption of a referendum ..
.. Or you can fund the laws that protect journalists before they get financially destroyed.
We chose the first option.
