Lorna Skinner KC and Kirsten Sjøvoll acted for a Defendant in a successful application to strike out a libel claim arising from a Facebook Post published in 2021. There had already been a trial of the libel claim, during which the Defendant was unrepresented. The trial judge had been taken ill before judgment could be delivered. A retrial was ordered by Mrs Justice Collins Rice, joint Judge in charge of the Media & Communications List.
The parties are mother and daughter in law. The claimant, Lynette Tattersall, is the mother of the late Mr Michael Tattersall, who died suddenly in 2019. The defendant, Yvonne Tattersall, was his widow. Following his death, a family dispute arose over liabilities and assets, and by June 2021 the claimant had issued County Court proceedings concerning the home that the defendant had shared with the deceased. Mrs Justice Collins Rice found that the pleaded case on serious harm was fundamentally deficient and disclosed no reasonable basis upon which the claim could succeed. It was moreover disproportionate and not in the interests of justice to allow it to proceed to trial and the claim was struck out and dismissed.