Out-Law.com has more on the recent ruling in London that seemed to buck a trend of granting the rich and famous super-injunctions to protect their privacy from media exposure:
The High Court’s refusal to issue an injunction preventing the media from reporting an alleged affair footballer John Terry had with a team mate’s girlfriend is unlikely to change the course of privacy law, an expert said.
[…]
The Court said that Terry did not qualify for the privacy protection conferred in other cases in relation to his alleged affair. Mr Justice Tugendhat said that the application for the injunction, which tried to stop the News of the World running a story on the alleged affair, was motivated more by Terry’s fears for his business prospects than for a genuine desire for privacy.
“I think it likely that the nub of the applicant’s complaint is to protect [his] reputation, in particular with sponsors,” he said in his ruling. John Terry is not named in the case itself, but the News of the World and its sister paper The Sun have carried stories linking the case to his alleged affair.
Some commentators have suggested that the case illustrates a restriction on the recently-expanded privacy rights of celebrities, but privacy law expert Rosemary Jay said that the refusal to grant the injunction had more to do with how the case was actually brought.
“The applicant faced a number of difficulties in bringing his case for an injunction,” said Jay. “The applicant himself did not give any evidence or present evidence from the person with whom he had the relationship. So the Court had no evidence that the parties involved would suffer any distress from publication. The judge seemed to doubt that as he commented that the applicant appeared to have a robust personality.”
Read more on Out-Law.com