To wonder what the point of an injunctions is?

[LikeDylanInTheMovies]

In the age of social media and access to news sources across the globe, it seems absurd to a layperson that a ruling that only applies to England and Wales would serve to keep a lid on a story? Anyone interested in discovering the identity of the person concerned can find out who the people involved are with a few taps of their keyboard.

Likewise in PR terms it seems a disaster, would it not have been better to just say ' yes we have an open relationship, both parties are happy with that and it is nobody else's concern, but we are disappointed people we considered friends sought to profit from our private life' rather than stirring up even more interest and gossip via an injunction that was never likely to be effective. I have no interest in who celebrities sleep with, but my interest was piqued by the heavy handed and ultimately futile injunction.

Is there anyone with experience of the legal/PR industries think of these injunctions? Are they an expensive waste of time or can they be effective in furnishing celebrities with a degree of privacy?

Dammit I have NO IDEA who you are talking about. And now I want to know. Even though, when I do find out, I probably won't care.

Why don't you enquire (us publication) about it.

This is clearly not in the public interest and I think that the DM is pushing for this because they do have a rather homophobic attitude

I don't doubt that, but the tabloid press has displayed an equally prurient attitude to the antics of heterosexual couples with Vernon Kay being the latest recipient of the tabloid's knicker sniffing disguised as moral outrage.

Anyway was an injunction ever likely to prevent the information leaking out?

Well this thread got weird... T think potatoes is being deliberately goady tbh.

I don't know who is involved! Someone pm me and tell me where to look please

I agree with everysongbird. The DM does present a homophobic slant. As for this injunction, I think it's caused quite a furore. I almost wonder if that was the aim

Hippy it's literally all over Twitter if you just search #superinjunction.

Well thanks to the injunction in place it isn't possible for the National press to print the information, but any determined Enquirer should be able to find the information out, should they be interested.

Oh the DM is chomping at the bit to print who it is. I just checked their website. They have three articles about it, including one where they have actually printed the story but redacted the bits that breach the injunction and the piece de la resistance- a column by Richard Littlejohn dealing with the subject. It's pretty funny. Once they are allowed to print, they will spontaneously combust with excitement.

I think they were pretty stupid as it would have been a bit of a non-story if they hadn't taken out the injunction.

I feel very uncomfortable about these injunctions because they basically enshrine the right of the rich to prevent poor people saying things about them which are true because they don't like them. There's a very simple solution to not having embarrassing things printed about you in the papers - don't do them in the first place.

I mean, look at Steve Coogan and Hugh Grant. They're very vocal about this because they want the right to treat women like prostituted meat and spend their lives off their faces on drugs but they don't want anyone to know because it's so distasteful people will stop buying their stuff. Why should we have a legal system which covers up things like that in order to protect rich men's right to become even richer?

It's created a two tier system where the rich can buy silence but the poor are fair game because they can't afford to do anything about it.

Silencing the truth because it's inconvenient is dangerous. This is a fairly insignificant thing, but it creates a climate where more important things can be hushed up.

Given the discussion of homophobia and antipathy towards same sex marriage in the DM, this may give you a cue. Sometimes when tabloid has a story about a celebrity they can't or won't print, they will print seemingly innocuous stories about said celebrities doing mundane things, causing the reader to wonder what the point of the article is. Sometime they'll give even bigger clues like Celeb X was seen in [random location] looking carefree/relaxed/pensive/putting on a show of unity' with their partner. I'm not saying the Daily Mail has done it in this case, but as an academic exercise it would be interesting to scan the DM to see if they've included an unusually high number of comparatively banal stories featuring a particular same sex couple over the past 10 days or so.

Completely true Movies...

Unrelated but do you ever use Blind Gossip?

Paul I'd never heard of it til now, but will have a look!

Agree that the couple should have owned it - then it would have gone away.

Super injunctions are pointless - at best they can buy you a bit of time to sort yourselves out in private before the storm breaks. At worst they fan the flames of interest and cost a fortune.

Also agree that the press with its salacious reporting of details that entertain the bored masses for a few minutes over coffee contribute nothing to the pubic good.

When the appetite for gossip has been sated - until the next story - the individuals are left with the consequences.

I do believe that there should be something in place to give individuals some sort of privacy yet I am also a strong defender of freedom of speech and the press. as yet cannot reconcile the two in law and generally would rely on people's sense of decency. (Ha! Ha!)

I just think that no-one's cupboard is completely free from skeletons and I'd hate mine to be dangled in front of my friends and colleagues.

Only if you have time to spare Movies! You can get really sucked in.

Why does anyone care?

At the time of the Giggs super-injunction, when the powers-that-be decided to be terribly concerned about his privacy and his kids' potential hurt feelings, a tabloid gleefully printed the story of an ordinary married father who had frozen to death following a meeting with his OW. Yet nobody cared about that man's privacy or his kids' feelings about the salacious story that was, frankly, nobody's business but the wife's and the OW's. There are different rules when folk have cash to splash and it isn't right. So, I'm kinda glad that this injunction has failed spectacularly to protect this celeb, not because I dislike his work or anything (far from it), but in the interests of fairness.

In an ideal world no one would care about this stuff and sleazy tabloids like the Sun and the DM would go out of business, but that's a different topic.

Frenzied speculation also implicates innocent celebrities (in the Giggs case for example, numerous Twitter users erroneously claimed that it related to Shearer, and Gaby Logan's name came up too) which is also pretty unfair.

I guess the superinjunction doesn't stop people knowing but it does stop the press writing hundreds of detailed articles of the story and stops the camping outside your door and harassing you in Waitrose.

In this case the super-injunction is ludicrous.
a) It is all over the internet who they are. Doubt anyone gives a toss really.
b) The details can be read in the American press. What is the point of the super-injunction? Is it that it stops anyone without internet access reading the story? It is pointless.
c) They have made it a bigger story by the super-injunction. Symptomatic of this couple that they think they matter so much to the world. Who cares? I would not have been interested other than the super-injunction has drawn my attention to it. It has now affirmed my view of them as narcissistic, attention-loving, tantrum-throwing, drama-queens (not used in homophobic sense). Actually, had the story been printed, I would have sympathised with them if they had just owned it and said 'Whatever? And?' and left it at that in a dignified way. Their demanding of a super-injunction is pathetic.

Weirdest thread derail ever by the self important potatoes
Agree they've made people more interested, and a lot if work for MNHQ for having to delete threads to save them legal costs, than if it had been a non story.

I guess the superinjunction...stops the camping outside your door and harassing you in Waitrose

Hahaha. No it doesn't. For a start it only applies to the British press so the overseas press still do that. Even the British press don't leave you alone, they're still on the lookout. Whenever there is an injunction the press always put out an unrelated story about the same people. Like they did this week.

Plus if you're rich enough to afford one you wouldn't be seen dead either in Waitrose or on your own doorstep. It's very much flunked doing the shopping and underground car exit money to get an injunction.

Do they have Waitrose in Italy?

I agree with Lulu. It smacks of extreme vanity to presume that your love life will be in the papers for more than maybe a couple of days. Most people when they find out who the super injunctions are about are massively disinterested after the first 10 minutes, mostly because it's people behaving as you would expect. Footballer has affair with a glamour model.No shit Sherlock! Rock star from the 70's in an open marriage? Well, that was unexpected (not)

I didn't know who this couple were, until yesterday when there was a thread which had 90% of the messages deleted.
Potatoes has clearly missed the point as its the Daily Mail that are pushing it, in fact it was the whole of their front page yesterday.