It's my review, I'll lie if I want to . . .


This may be one of the most in-your-face libel cases of all time:

My libel victory underlinesthe need for journaliststo check their facts
A critic is free to hate a book but this ruling found Lynn Barber had a reckless disregard for the truth

. . . Barber had made a major point of claiming that I had not interviewed her when, in fact, I had. She also claimed that I gave copy approval to my interviewees, which was untrue.

Combined with a few other factual errors, the false allegations contributed to the irresistible inference that I was a charlatan who could not be trusted to tell the truth. I wrote to the Telegraph requesting that it correct the errors and was shocked when they refused. According to Mr Justice Tugendhat, Barber made "a deliberate decision to mislead" the Telegraph's lawyers. As a result, the falsehoods lingered online, causing me all sorts of problems, and I was forced to seek legal representation to clear my name. . . .

Talk about your slam dunk.
The case is in the UK, which has different standards for libel than the U.S. (And it's even more complicated here, since libel is a state-level matter, and parsing fact from opinion is always an interesting legal exercise.) Still, I can't imagine the reaction a jury would have when presented with the fact that the reviewer who claimed NOT to have been interviewed was.

Full story here, with a hat-tip to Lloyd Jassin at Copylaw.org for pointing it out (via Twitter).