High Court Refuses Interim Injunction in Website Publication Claim

March 22, 2026

Read v De Giovanni [2026] EWHC 243 (KB)

Introduction

In Read v De Giovanni [2026] EWHC 243 (KB), Deputy High Court Judge Aidan Eardley KC, sitting in the Media and Communications List, refused an application for an interim injunction in a claim for libel, malicious falsehood and harassment. Although the claimant’s written and oral submissions also relied on misuse of private information, that cause of action had not been pleaded.

The decision draws an important distinction between two questions that are often treated together in urgent media litigation. The first is whether the claimant may ultimately have a substantial claim. The second is whether the court should restrain publication before trial. On the material then before it, the court considered that the claimant was likely to establish at trial that responsibility for the website and the messages lay with the first and second defendants. Even so, interim relief was refused because the necessary thresholds for such relief had not been crossed and because the delay in seeking restraint, coupled with the likelihood that most of the damage had already occurred, provided further substantial reasons for refusal.

For practitioners, the decision is a reminder of the need for careful pleading, proper evidence and speed. Prior restraint remains exceptional.

Factual background

The underlying dispute arose from dealings said to have begun in about May 2024. On the claimant’s account, the first defendant, whom she described as her friend, asked whether she knew anyone who might help with a blocked payment account. She agreed only to make an introduction to a man referred to in the judgment as Mr Farhan, whom she said she knew socially and who had experience with payment platforms. She maintained that she was not involved in any transaction, did not direct any business and received no payment or benefit. Her case was that she was no more than an innocent introducer acting in good faith.

She was then added to a WhatsApp group with the first and second defendants and Mr Farhan. The discussions concerned a blocked Stripe account. The claimant’s evidence was that she did not support any proposal that Mr Farhan’s account should be used to process the defendants’ funds. That matters because the later website portrayed her in a radically different light.

The claimant also relied on a website concerning Mr Farhan, said to have appeared in early October 2024, as showing a similar pattern of conduct. She further said that Mr Farhan contacted her asking to borrow substantial sums and later said that he was under pressure in relation to money transfers. The court did not determine those allegations, but they formed part of the claimant’s account of the events that followed.

On 8 October 2024, the claimant said that she received WhatsApp messages from an unknown number threatening that, unless matters were resolved, the issue would be brought to public attention. The messages, as reproduced in the judgment, included statements such as “Reputation is everything” and threats that the sender would publicise what had happened if matters were not resolved.

The following day she received a link to a website at nikoleread.info. The website bore the headline “How We Were Scammed by Nikole Read…A Warning for Entrepreneurs”. The publication accused the claimant of being a co-conspirator with Mr Farhan in a fraud. It alleged that she had presented herself as the owner of a property business, used those credentials to persuade the defendants to enter an arrangement involving Mr Farhan’s Stripe account, and then disappeared with money. The judge expressly described that summary as only a brief précis and not a determination of meaning.

The claimant said that the website was altered several times between October 2024 and April 2025. The changes were said to be mostly minor, but included replacing “Nikole” with “Nikole Read”, thereby making her more readily identifiable. She also said that the publication remained online and was causing her distress, anxiety, reputational harm and financial loss, although the evidence gave almost no detail about her business, the nature of the loss, the prominence of the website, search visibility, readership or reactions from third parties.

Procedurally, the claim was also underdeveloped. The claim form was filed in October 2025. An earlier urgent without notice injunction application had been refused by Jeremy Johnson J. A further application proceeded after directions by O’Farrell J for alternative service. By the time of the hearing before Deputy High Court Judge Eardley KC, no particulars of claim had yet been filed or served. The judge later observed that the claimant had put relatively little information before the court and that the absence of particulars of claim made it difficult to see how the case was to be proved. Only the second defendant had filed evidence. He denied responsibility for the website and threats, but in oral submissions said that the contents of the website were true. His account was that he and the first defendant had been defrauded, that the claimant had vouched for Mr Farhan, and that after substantial sums were transferred both Mr Farhan and the claimant effectively disappeared.

The court was careful not to resolve that factual conflict. The application concerned interim relief, not final findings of fact.

The issues before the court

The central question was whether the claimant had shown a sufficient basis for interim injunctive relief, including a mandatory order requiring the website to be taken down and prohibitory relief restraining further publication, operation of the website and financial threats.

That raised a series of linked issues.

First, on the present evidence, was the claimant likely to establish that the first and second defendants were responsible for the website and the threatening communications?

Secondly, had she shown that she was likely to succeed at trial in one or more substantive causes of action in a way that could justify prior restraint, as required by section 12(3) of the Human Rights Act 1998 and, in the case of defamation and malicious falsehood, by the traditional rule in Bonnard v Perryman [1891] 2 Ch 269?

Thirdly, if harassment was the relevant route to injunctive relief, was there a real present threat of repetition, rather than merely evidence of past wrongdoing?

Fourthly, even if some threshold were met, had delay and the apparent fact that most of the damage had already occurred made interim relief inappropriate?

The court’s reasoning

Responsibility for publication

The judge considered that, on the present and incomplete material, she was likely to establish at trial that responsibility for the website and the threatening messages lay with the first and second defendants. He stressed that this was not a final finding of fact. It was an evaluative prediction made on incomplete evidence for the purposes of section 12(3).

Several features drove that conclusion. The website and threats appeared to come from those with knowledge of the failed dealings with Mr Farhan. The chronology suggested that attention turned to the claimant only after attempts to extract money from Mr Farhan had failed. The earlier website about Mr Farhan supported the claimant’s contention that a similar tactic had been used before. The LinkedIn exchange between the claimant’s husband and the second defendant was also capable of supporting an inference that the second defendant regarded the claimant as having wronged him and might be in a position to procure the website’s removal.

That conclusion, however, was only one step in the analysis. Likely responsibility for publication was not the same as likely liability in any substantive cause of action or as likely success in obtaining a final injunction. The claimant still had to surmount the substantive thresholds for final injunctive relief.

Misuse of private information

Although misuse of private information was not one of the pleaded causes of action, the judge addressed it because the claimant’s written and oral submissions relied on it. On the material before the court, the claimant was not likely to prove at trial that her private information had been misused or that a final injunction should be granted on that basis.

The first difficulty was pleading. Misuse of private information was not included in the claim form, and no application to amend had been made. The judge regarded that as sufficient in itself to dispose of that aspect of the application.

He nevertheless went on to consider the substance. The claimant relied on a screenshot of a social media exchange reproduced on the website, together with photographs of herself and the circumstance that the website drew on information known only to a small circle. None of that persuaded the court that the material was likely to attract a reasonable expectation of privacy within the principles summarised in Prismall v Google UK Ltd [2024] EWCA Civ 1516.

The screenshot was described as anodyne and revealing little or nothing intelligible about the claimant’s private or family life. The photographs were posed images, apparently taken with her consent, at least one of them in what seemed to be a public or professional setting. There was nothing intimate or inherently revealing about them. The claimant’s real concern, the judge held in substance, was not the inclusion of these materials but the text of the accusations.

Nor was the broader commercial context enough to convert the case into one about private information. On the claimant’s own account, she had become embroiled in commercial discussions and then in a bitter commercial dispute. The judge accepted that personal and professional spheres are not watertight compartments, but on the present evidence he considered it unlikely that the claimant would persuade a trial judge that those business dealings fell within the realm of her private life.

Accordingly, the section 12(3) threshold was not met in respect of any putative misuse of private information claim.

Defamation

The claimant also failed, at this stage, to establish a sufficient basis for a libel injunction.

The website allegations were plainly grave and the judge accepted that the statement was defamatory at common law on any view. But that was not enough. Under section 1 of the Defamation Act 2013, as explained in Lachaux v Independent Print Ltd [2019] UKSC 27, the claimant still had to show serious harm as a matter of fact or proper inference. Here the evidence was conspicuously thin.

The court knew very little about the claimant’s own situation. It had no evidence about how prominent the website was, how many people had seen it, how easily it could be found, whether it ranked in search engines, or what audience it had reached. No adverse treatment by third parties was identified. The bare assertion of business loss was unexplained. In those circumstances, the judge held that, for that reason alone, it was not likely, on the present evidence, that the claimant would succeed at trial in libel or obtain final injunctive relief on that basis.

The reasoning shows that the gravity of an allegation and the offensiveness of a publication will not, without more, establish serious harm for the purposes of urgent injunctive relief. The court still requires a sufficient evidential basis from which serious reputational damage can properly be inferred.

The judge added that Bonnard v Perryman might present a further obstacle. The second defendant had stated, albeit orally rather than in a witness statement, that the website allegations were true and had given a fairly detailed explanation of why he said so. The judge did not decide the point because the serious harm deficiency was already sufficient to defeat the application on defamation. He also declined to express a view on the unresolved possibility, noted by Warby J in LJY v Persons Unknown [2017] EWHC 3230 (QB), that there may in some cases be a blackmail-related exception to the ordinary libel rule.

Malicious falsehood

The malicious falsehood claim failed for a different but equally basic evidential reason.

Because the tort protects economic interests rather than reputation, the claimant needed either to prove special damage or to bring herself within the statutory route under section 3(1) of the Defamation Act 1952, under which special damage may be presumed where the words are calculated to cause pecuniary damage. On either route, the court required much more than a bare assertion that business loss had been suffered. Following Tesla Motors Ltd v BBC [2013] EWCA Civ 152, the judge held that the claimant had not identified the nature of the loss or the mechanism by which it was likely to be sustained. For that reason alone, it was not likely, on the present evidence, that she would establish malicious falsehood at trial or obtain final injunctive relief on that basis.

The judgment therefore underlines the need, in malicious falsehood claims, to articulate financial loss with specificity, particularly on an urgent injunction application.

Harassment

Harassment brought the claimant closer to success, but not close enough.

The judge accepted that the blackmail demands, followed by a website using the claimant’s own name in the domain and attacking her, might well prove at trial to be a course of conduct amounting to harassment. The later editing of the site to make her full name more prominent might also form part of that course. The judgment therefore left open the possibility that the claimant may well establish at trial that she had been the victim of past harassment, entitling her to damages.

The difficulty was different. Injunctive relief required a present threat or a sufficiently strong risk of future harassment. The communications and website launch had occurred in October 2024. There was no evidence of changes to the website after April 2025. The LinkedIn exchange of 29 October 2025 had been initiated by the claimant’s husband, and the claimant confirmed that she had received no further communications from the defendants. On that basis, the judge was not satisfied that the first essential condition for a harassment injunction, namely a present threat or a sufficiently strong risk of future harassment, had been established.

The reasoning therefore distinguished between a potentially arguable claim for damages in respect of past harassment and the separate forward-looking basis needed for interlocutory restraint.

Delay

The judge said that his conclusions on the threshold tests were sufficient to dispose of the application. He nevertheless gave two further, closely connected reasons for refusing relief.

The first was delay. The claimant did not seek an injunction until more than a year after the blackmail demands and her discovery of the website, a period longer than the basic one year limitation period for libel and malicious falsehood. The explanation given was that the events had seriously affected her health and required therapeutic support. The judge accepted that she had plainly found the matter distressing, but was not persuaded on the evidence that this explained or justified the full extent of the delay. Nor did he accept that it was reasonable simply to await the outcome of police involvement while the website remained online.

The second was that, by the time relief was sought, much of the damage likely to be prevented by a timely injunction had probably already occurred. The judge observed that online statements which attract attention tend to do so when first published and that any audience commonly falls away over time. Against that background, the prospect of significant fresh irreparable harm before trial had become too remote. If damage had already been done, it was more appropriately met by a monetary remedy than by belated interlocutory restraint.

The decision

The application for an interim injunction was refused.

Importantly, the court was not deciding the truth of the underlying allegations at this interlocutory stage. The claimant denied the accusations published on the website and maintained that she had done no more than make an innocent introduction in good faith. The second defendant denied responsibility for the website, the threatening messages and any harassing communications, although he said in oral submissions that the contents of the website were true. The claimant also told the court that the first defendant had denied liability for the website by email, but he neither attended the hearing nor filed evidence. The judge therefore stressed that he had made no findings of fact about the conduct of the parties or of Mr Farhan, those issues being matters for trial.

Why the decision matters

Privacy cannot be assumed merely because material comes from social media or from a limited circle. The court will scrutinise what the material actually is. Anodyne exchanges, posed photographs and commercial discussions will not necessarily attract Article 8 protection, especially where the real sting lies in the defamatory allegation rather than in collateral material used to illustrate it.

Serious harm and financial loss still require evidence. In defamation, claimants should be ready to address audience, prominence, search visibility, identifiable reactions and any concrete business or professional consequences. In malicious falsehood, they should identify the nature of the loss and the mechanism by which it is said to arise.

Delay remains critical. In media and communications litigation, speed is often part of the merits. A claimant who waits many months before seeking restraint may still pursue a damages claim, but will find it far harder to show that interlocutory relief now serves a real protective purpose.

Further Reading

• Misuse of Private Information Solicitors
• Malicious Falsehood in English Law
• Serious Harm in Defamation Claims
• Pre-Action Protocol for Media and Communications Claims

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If you require advice about online defamation, malicious falsehood, misuse of private information, harassment, or urgent injunctive relief, contact Carruthers Law. We act for clients across England and Wales in complex reputation and media disputes.

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Disclaimer: This article is provided for general information purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Carruthers Law accepts no responsibility for any reliance placed on the contents. This article may include material from court judgments and contains public sector information licensed under the Open Justice Licence v1.0.