Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why should Dr Christian Jessen’s fans pay his legal bill?

Dr Christian Jessen (Getty images)

Wasn’t the whole point of crowdfunding supposed to be about enabling community and artistic projects to take place? That was how I remember it being sold to us, at any rate. But no, I got it wrong. It turns out that the real point of it is to help celebrities pay their legal bills. 

Dr Christian Jessen, who appears on a Channel 4 show called Embarrassing Bodies, has been ordered by a Belfast court to pay £125,000 in libel damages to former Northern Irish first minister Arlene Foster for tweeting the false allegation that she was having an extra-marital affair. It is believed that legal costs could add a further £300,000 to his bill. 

By Monday morning, Jessen had raised £7000 of the £150,000 he is hoping to raise.

How to pay? Not, apparently, from his earnings as a celebrity doctor. Jessen has set up a crowdfunding page, claiming that he is suffering from serious mental health issues and that he is considering launching an appeal. By Monday morning, he had raised £7000 of the £150,000 he is hoping to raise.

I am not without sympathy for Dr Jessen. While he might have been wrong to issue his tweet, and ignored a request from Foster’s lawyer to delete it quickly – something which might have saved him from a legal trial – libel law in Northern Ireland has escaped even the modest reforms enacted in England and Wales over the past decade. As Kate Hoey and many others have complained, it is exerting a chilling restriction on the ability of investigative newspapers. This isn’t just a result of punitive awards, but of grossly excessive fees, which allow the wealthy to silence their critics through the threat of financial ruin. Moreover, libel courts over the past few decades have hardly proved themselves to be adept at teasing out the truth.

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