Actor Noel Clarke’s claims that the harassment and bullying accusations against him were the result of a conspiracy between a group of people in the film industry and The Guardian newspaper “lacked any proper foundation”, a High Court judge said.
Clarke, 49, sued Guardian News and Media (GNM) over seven articles and a podcast, including an article in April 2021 that said 20 women who knew him professionally had come forward with allegations of misconduct, including harassment and sexually inappropriate behaviour.
On Friday, Mrs Justice Steyn ruled that the reporting was true and in the public interest.
At a trial which began in March, the Doctor Who star alleged that a group of “primary conspirators” colluded to ruin his reputation and have his Bafta award removed.
He also alleged that The Guardian did not conduct a thorough journalistic investigation and acted with the alleged conspirators to rush the story to publication in order to beat rival newspapers.
Philip Williams, for Clarke, said in written submissions at the end of the trial in April that the conspiracy began in 2019 and was propagated through anonymous emails under the pseudonym Karen Karenson.
In addition to the complaints published in The Guardian, he said there were “wildly unfounded accusations” that were meant to “maximise damage” against Clarke and stop his Bafta award.
After The Guardian’s reporting went public, Bafta withdrew its award from the actor, citing the story as the first detailed evidence it had seen about the allegations.
Mr Williams said the “vitriolic campaign” was “overwhelmingly apparent” to the newspaper, which he said acted recklessly, adding that there was “contamination” of sources.
He also showed the court two diagrams of “primary connections” and “secondary connections” that purported to show the links between the alleged conspirators.
In the diagrams, names are linked by multicoloured arrows, and they include people who spoke out after publication of the first article and those against whom there is “no allegation”.
Mr Williams said: “A handful of people were plotting and carrying out their scheme from 2019 to bring about Mr Clarke’s downfall, based on vitriolic hatred, professional jealousy, classist snobbery and insidious racialised bias.”
He continued: “At its lowest, the defendant and its journalists were clearly aware of the conspiracy and therefore fell into its common design, and at its highest, they actively conspired with the conspirators and their associates to publish the seriously defamatory articles against the claimant.”
Gavin Millar KC, for GNM, said in written submissions that there is “not a shred of evidence” to support Clarke’s conspiracy claim and described it as “nonsensical and rather desperate speculation”.
He said it was “born of necessary invention” as Clarke had “long pinned his hopes” on The Guardian’s witnesses not attending trial to give evidence, adding that the claim was “wholly unevidenced and inherently implausible”.
The barrister described Mr Williams’s cross-examination on the subject of a conspiracy as a “speculative fishing expedition which produced no evidence of such a conspiracy”, which “turned to dust”.
In her 224-page ruling, Mrs Justice Steyn said that there was “no conspiracy to lie” by witnesses who gave evidence against Clarke at trial.
She also said that while there were “connections” among the witnesses, many “came forward independently”.
The judge variously described claims by Clarke that individual witnesses were part of a conspiracy as “absolutely baseless”, “misconceived”, “speculative” and “based on unfounded assertion”.
She said: “Mr Clarke’s case that there is an unlawful means conspiracy against him, in which many of the witnesses, and some non-witnesses, are said to have engaged, was born of necessity, in the face of the large body of witnesses giving evidence against him.
“It lacked any proper foundation and led to numerous witnesses being asked speculative questions as to their connections, without a case being put that they conspired and colluded to invent allegations, or any evidential basis on which such a case could have been put.”
She continued: “In the absence of a conspiracy, Mr Clarke’s case that more than 20 witnesses, none of whom are parties or have a stake in this case, as he does, have come to court to lie is inherently implausible.”
