KITTY HOLLAND AWARDED €35K IN DAMAGES AS SHE WINS DEFAMATION CASE AGAINST JOHN WATERS
Journalist Kitty Holland has been awarded €35,000 in damages after winning her defamation case against John Waters.
A judge said journalist and anti-abortion activist Waters launched a 'serious attack' on Holland's integrity in comments he made about a report on Savita Halappanavar.
Holland, The Irish Times' Social Affairs Correspondent, was a 'much respected and ethical journalist' and for another respected and well-known writer to suggest she had been deceitful was 'consequential,' Judge John O'Connor of the Circuit Court said in his judgement after a five-day hearing.
The judge said although Waters had told the court he had just been expressing an opinion on a matter of public importance, he failed to show that what he had said was true. Opinion needed to be grounded in fact.
The five-day defamation hearing was based on Waters' comments in the lead-up to the 2018 abortion referendum on an Irish Times report written by Holland in 2012 about the death of Savita Halappanavar, who was miscarrying her baby when brought to the hosptial.
In his speech to Renua party conference in 2017, Waters claimed there wasn't a single history any doctor could provide of a mother dying because of an inability to provide her with treatment that was related to abortion.
At the time, he said: 'Savita Halapanavar is the closest they’ve come, and we know that that’s a lie. We know it’s a lie that resulted in the journalist who started the lie getting multiple awards from her colleagues.'
During the trial, Waters said the reference to Holland was intended as an attack on The Irish Times' report rather than on the journalist herself, whom he had known since she was a child.
Judge O'Connor, however, found that the comments read as if Holland 'started a lie on one of the most important news stories in the last decade in Ireland and that she got awards for propagating that lie.'
The judge said he had seen no evidence that would justify accusation of bias in Holland's reporting. The Irish Times' news report in question hadn't been 'vitiated' by significant errors or omissions that would constitute a lie. He continued that the standard of journalistic verification and checking was 'thorough'.
Judge O'Connor awarded Holland €35,000 in general damages saying she was 'held in very high esteem as a journalist by her peers and this is confirmed today by this court.'