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Vanessa Perroncel attacks gagging orders for footballers
Vanessa Perroncel, the French model at the centre of the John Terry sex scandal has attacked the use of legal gagging orders to prevent the press reporting details of footballers’ private lives.
Miss Perroncel, who denies having an affair with the former England captain, said highly paid players should not be allowed to use their wealth to “cherry pick” how they are portrayed in the media even if the allegations are untrue.
Miss Perroncel, 33, the former girlfriend of Wayne Bridge, the Manchester City player and former Chelsea team-mate of Terry, spoke out after two other Premiership stars used the courts to ban publication of potentially damaging allegations.
It emerged earlier this month that Colin Montgomerie, the golfer, had recently secured an injunction banning a tabloid newspaper from printing allegations involving his former girlfriend, Paula Tagg.
There was also outrage last year after a wide-ranging injunction granted to the Swiss multinational Trafigura appeared to restrict what MPs could say in Parliament.
The two most recent orders, granted by Mr Justice Nicol at the High Court, have revived the debate about so-called super injunctions, which forbid reporting even of their own existence.
One such order, secured by Terry earlier this year to keep allegations that he had an affair with Miss Perroncel out of the media, was overturned by Mr Justice Tugendhat who accused the player of wanting to protect his image for sponsorship purposes.
Terry was subsequently stripped of his England captaincy amid lurid stories about his private life.
Politicians, media lawyers and civil liberties campaigners say that some judges are effectively creating a privacy law “by the back door” by granting their willingness to grant gagging orders.
In a series of interviews Miss Perroncel openly criticised Terry’s decision to seek the injunction even though she insists that the allegations he was attempting to suppress were untrue.
She told the Independent on Sunday: “There are some people who enjoy the limelight, and they let the press have really intimate information, like weddings, baptisms and so on.
“So why should these people then be allowed to cherry pick what the newspapers write about them?
“I know how expensive it is to take out an injunction, and it's not fair that footballers should be allowed to protect themselves because of their money.”
Last week Lord McNally, the justice minister, told The Daily Telegraph that the Coalition would consider creating Britain’s first privacy law in order to prevent one being developed by stealth.
Lord Lester of Herne Hill, the Lib Dem peer who has proposed an overhaul of Britain’s libel laws, warned at the weekend that the proliferation of injunctions risks creating a Soviet style restriction of free speech.