BY GABRIEL PRINCEWILL
The Supreme court decision over the celebrity threesome ban is actually right. Following the article on this matter by one of our writers, the need for some clarity here.
The issue surrounding press freedom pitted against the right to privacy is sometimes shrouded in confusion because of the competing issues at hand. As such, members of the press can be forgiven for an erroneous perspective on this in the absence of greater clarity on how rights to freedom of expression should be used. Sometimes, there is no right or wrong, just lessons to be learned from particular situations.
As champions of freedom of expression at the eye of media.com, we allow articles expressing the reasonable views of our writers on various topics. However, this does not always mean there may not be flaws innocently contained in those views. Our writers express their views from an honest standpoint, and readers are free to challenge those views whenever and if ever they take exception to any views expressed. Writer,James Simons, took issue in his article with the conflicting verdicts given by the High court and the Supreme court on the injunction levied against the Sun on Sunday, banning them from identifying the couple at the center of the ‘kiss and tell’ story involving the celebrity couple involved in an extramarital threesome.
This article explains why the Supreme Court was in fact right in their verdict, and why the High court were in error, albeit, an understandable error given the intricacies of the competing legal principles at hand.
The right to freedom of expression affords every citizen, particularly the press, the right to publish factual information deemed in public interest. What constitutes the public interest in ambiguous, and necessarily means information that would interest the public, but also more crucially, information that is in the best interest of the public.
The latter is avowedly a subjective question and a value judgment that must be considered carefully, objectively, and responsibly. Even then, members of the press can only be expected to make a personal judgment on what is in the public interest and can’t be expected to be perfect in their judgment, as nobody is perfect. This is where insightful thinking and a multi-faceted evaluation comes in handy. The Supreme Court were right in their verdict, and showed supreme levels of thinking in getting it right. However, summary of reasons does not appear to have been sufficiently elaborate in explaining the overall reasoning behind their verdict.
An extramarital affair involving a sexual threesome engaged in by consenting adults will surely be interesting to the public where the participating parties are celebrities. However, where children are involved, it is not in the best interest of the public for such a story to be put in the public domain. In the absence of any cheating, the only issue that arises is a moral judgment based on the sanctity of marriage. Notwithstanding, such judgment falls outside the ambit of the participant’s privacy, given their mutual assent to the act at nobody’s expense.It is fair to say that those involved in the threesome don’t consider that they did anything wrong, even if many observing members of the public would reasonably construe their acts to have been morally reprehensible. The interests of the children who most likely would have been unaware of the private actions of their parents, would be a valuable consideration. Had this been a case of infidelity, the right to freedom of expression would rightly trump any consideration to protect the kids interest- as this would be something the transgressing parents should have contemplated before embarking on their cheating act.
The Supreme Court were indeed correct that the fact the story was already online in America does not mean it should be made worse by allowing more extensive coverage about such an intimate extramarital sexual engagement, without considering the children of these marriages. The conviction of The Sun on Sunday that they were denied their right to freedom of expression is perfectly understandable, but the consenting element of all the married partners involved, compounded by the fact they have young children who could endure much embarrassment and ridicule, makes publication of such a story against the public interest.
Judges in the high court who initially lifted the injunction, as well as the dissenting judge in the Supreme Court, did not weigh up the facts properly enough in the context of the applicable legal principles. The ostensibly conflicting verdicts of the High Court and The Supreme Court, simply confirms the grey area that sometimes inevitably exists when weighing up the competing rights of freedom of expression and the right to privacy. In Britain, celebrities have no definable right to privacy once they do an act where there is a legitimate public interest. They unwittingly gave up that right when they became public figures. The issue of privacy with celebrities only arise where there is no legitimate public interest in something they have done. The word ‘legitimate’ is key here. A public interest story has no legitimate objections against its publication and would interest a cross section of its audience. The legitimate objection against this story, to re-iterate, is that no child deserves to read in the press that their parents were involved in a three some with a third party. No child also deserves to read in the press that their parent has cheated on their spouse, but such a discomfort is one the cheating parent has created. Thankfully, the Supreme Court has got it right
