A landowner from Cumbria has been awarded around £22,000 in damages after suing a family of tenant farmers for libel and harassment.
Landowner and businessman Richard Parsons sued tenant farmers Elizabeth and Allan Garnett, along with their daughter, Katie Armistead, over a campaign of anonymous poison pen letters that surfaced in the local village between 2018 and 2020.
According to a High Court ruling, handed down earlier this week, there is a “history of friction and grievance” between Parsons and the Garnetts.
He alleges “a protracted course of conduct, comprising publication by Mr and Mrs Garnett of a series of unpleasant and abusive anonymous communications, which among other things impugn Mr Parsons’ business practices and ethics and their impact on the community, attack his family and allege him to be an adulterer, sexual exploiter and predatory abuser of a vulnerable woman”, High Court judge Mrs Justice Collins Rice said in her ruling.
In the claim, “reasons are set out, relating to the parties’ antecedent history, to explain Mr and Mrs Garnett’s alleged engagement in this course of conduct”.
The case is “unusual”, the judge said, because, although the Garnetts initially denied involvement and said they would “vigorously defend” any claim and “look forward to our day in court”, they did not formally respond to the claim.
A few days before the case was due to come to court on 14 November, the Garnetts’ solicitor wrote to the court to say that they didn’t plan to formally acknowledge or respond to the claim. They also didn’t plan to defend it; however, they didn’t concede it either. They said their lawyers would address the court.
At the hearing, lawyers for Parsons asked for default judgment in his favour. The judge, in her ruling, agreed.
“The parties agree the situation before me is unusual,” she said. “I have no pleaded case from the Garnetts, in response to either the claim or the application for default judgment. They have not acknowledged the claim or conceded the application. Nor have they applied to strike out Mr Parsons’ case, in whole or in part. They are not asking to be allowed to defend the claim – and that is an important point of distinction from some of the authorities we looked at. They simply wish the litigation with its attendant stresses to be over.
“Instead, I had submissions challenging the application for default judgment… And I have the witness statements.”
In a detailed judgment, Collins Rice J found that Parsons’ case was “a soundly pleaded case of serious harm, properly particularised in accordance with the decided authorities”.
She added: “It is heavily inferential, but the facts from which inference is invited are set out, and an inference of the causation or likely causation of serious reputational harm in the local community based on those facts is not on the face of it unreal. It is classically what anonymous poison pen letters have a propensity to do, in a village context. It is their whole point.”
She also found that, owing to the history of friction between them, the Garnetts’ possible involvement in the poison pen letters is not an “unreal theory”.
As for the Garnetts, the judge commented: “They protest that the anonymous material came to them from somewhere else and they gave it little or no further currency.
“Mr Parsons’ case is that someone is behind the circulation of the anonymous material, it is inherently improbable that anyone will own up to it, and he has reason to believe the Garnetts are the likely culprits. That is what he alleged and he said why he alleged it. He pleaded that soundly, and faced taking on the consequent burden of proving his allegations in court.
“The Garnetts were equally entitled to deny them and to put him to that proof at a trial. But they have not done so, and do not seek to do so. Their denial of publication, however vehement, does not substitute for a defence and does not make the case against them unreal.”
In conclusion, she ruled that Parsons is “entitled to judgment against the defendants”.
She awarded him around £22,000 in damages.
Richard Alan Parsons v (1) Elizabeth Garnett (2) Allan Garnett (3) Katie Armistead
High Court, KBD (Collins Rice J) 28 November 2022
