The Sunday Herald

Scotland Herald Puts He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named On Its Front Page,Utterly extraordinary front page of the Sunday Herald in Scotland this morning. Six little tweets in the UK have sparked a huge war over super injunctions — gag orders that British citizens can get to suppress news concerning themselves from making it into the mainstream media. The media can’t even report that a super injunction exists.

After a Twitter user alleged sexual indiscretions by a host of British celebrities that were allegedly protected by super injunctions, it set off a firestorm, forcing British lawmakers to think about whether such a thing is still feasible in the age of social media, and if it is, how to enforce it. One of the celebs, a soccer player who is alleged to have a super injunction for scoring goals with a woman who was not his wife, has filed a lawsuit to find out who the user behind the anonymous @InjunctionSuper account is. His lawyers identify him as “CTB” in the lawsuit, but it quickly emerged through social media and the American press (which is not subject to the super injunction) that the client was Manchester United player Ryan Giggs.

The latest salvo in the super injunctions battle (via Parmy Olson) comes from the Scottish Sunday Herald, which has put Giggs on its front page with a black bar over his eyes, to, um, protect his identity:

“Everyone knows that this is the footballer accused of using the courts to keep allegations of a sexual affair secret. But we weren’t supposed to tell you that…,” reads the Herald’s front page. Due to the traffic to the Scotland Herald’s website, it’s down, though the Guardian reports that the article and photo have not been published online.

Text from the Scotland Herald’s editorial via the Guardian (which still cannot name Giggs, and instead accompanies the story with a photo of Imogen Thomas, the model with whom Giggs is alleged to have offsided. The tortuous caption for the photo reads “Imogen Thomas’s alleged former lover has been unmasked by a Scottish newspaper.”):

    Today we identify the footballer whose name has been linked to a court superinjunction by thousands of postings on Twitter. Why? Because we believe it is unsustainable that the law can be used to prevent newspapers from publishing information that readers can access on the internet at the click of a mouse…

    Because we believe it unfair that the law can not only be used to prevent the publication of information which may be in the public interest but also to prevent any mention of such a court order.

… and because it’s going to sell tons of newspapers.

    The so-called superinjunction holds no legal force in Scotland where a separate court order is needed. We should point out immediately that we are not accusing the footballer of any misdeed. Whether the allegations against him are true or not has no relevance to this debate.

Can the super injunction withstand this assault from social media and mainstream media alike? So far, it seems that Giggs’s super injunction has accomplished exactly the opposite of what he hoped for.
Source Forbes
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