An American billionaire, who gagged the British press after being arrested on suspicion of raping a woman at a top London hotel, is at the centre of a legal dispute in the US following allegations that he paid money to settle the claim.
The businessman was questioned by City of London Police in May, after a woman said she was attacked in the penthouse suite of a hotel in the heart of London’s financial centre.
Details of his arrest emerged the following month, but the father of two went to the High Court, and after paying £100,000 in legal fees, succeeded in winning an injunction against The Sun newspaper, which meant no British publication could name him.
Now in an extraordinary twist, those allegations have become the subject of a high profile legal battle in the United States, with the businessman sueing a public relations firm he has accused of peddling smears against him.
Details of the case have been reported in the US media – where the injunction does not apply – and so are available online for British readers.
However, here’s the fun bit. If British readers – ie, someone sitting in the UK – does access that information then those articles accessed are subject to the injunction. Odd but true, that’s how it works.
So if you now know –in the privacy of your own brain– who this American puke is *, that knowledge is illegal?
And yet we still know.
Piss off Lawdogs.
*I call the bloke “puke” not because of the supposed rape allegation which might be real or might be horseshit– such is the sad marx-poisoned age we live in– but because of his trying to hide knowledge from the people of this country. And getting away with it. Anyone without the readdies would have to suffer name-and-shame regardless of how bogus the claim might be.
In these post-inflationary days, billionaires aren’t what they used to be.
I can’t be ar$ed looking him or the accusation up. I will assume that he is probably innocent unless he is a little, you know, Vibrant. But either way with his money he will probably find a way to resolve this without prison time.
The story is carried (no doubt inter alia) by the NY Post online. Should they be made to take it down if I can read it in the UK? And what if I’m using a VPN which “says” I’m in New York?
That’s really rather the problem, the law’s out of whack with the world.
What exactly is injuncted? I have figured out who the guy is, sitting here in the UK. I won’t be repeating the story, but equally nobody was stopped from showing me the story on their non-UK websites. Which of us has broken the injunction?
Presumably the chap could be named by a Scottish newspaper, or would that be a Pile of Pish!
Just a thought: I see timworstall.com’s registered from Portugal. You’re either there or the CR. A large proportion of your readers are outside the UK. Presumably the mechanics of TW.com all happen in the States. Is there any reason why we can’t chat about this, naming names, without infringing a UK injunction? Your UK readers would be, of course, because rendering a browser page on their machine’s regarded as publishing. But not our problem, is it?
@bloke in spain
It also depends where the machine hosting this blog is, but as it appears to be a Dreamhost machine, it’s probably in California so injunction free. However, it may leave Tim open to legal action so it’s his call.
The Guido Fawkes blog order-order.com is offshore and is also owned and run by an offshore company, thus immune to British injunctions.
@Ecks: “but because of his trying to hide knowledge from the people of this country”
But if he had been arrested, not charged and told there would be no referral to the CPS, would we care that we didn’t know? Just sayin’.
Hmm. Does the alleged perp spin dreidels occasionally?
It took less than a minute to identify him (no I hadn’t heard of him either and no I really don’t think he spins dreidels!), Now I’m wondering why I bothered.
JL: Well, let’s just say that one never knows. One might assume that someone with a name like Anna Monahemi has never sat shiva, but there’s a bit of a difference between the Iranians who have stuck around under the less than ideal clerical regime *, and those who left for America or Israel.
* Obviously the Shah was better, but Khomeini is quite progressive by Muslim standards. Iran has been trying to discourage child marriage, even though Mohammed fucked a 9 year old and thus it is presumably acceptable for all Muslims to do the same.
“*I call the bloke “puke” not because of the supposed rape allegation which might be real or might be horseshit– such is the sad marx-poisoned age we live in– but because of his trying to hide knowledge from the people of this country. And getting away with it. Anyone without the readdies would have to suffer name-and-shame regardless of how bogus the claim might be.”
I’d have more sympathy with that view, Mr Ecks, if the media were impartial recorders of events. But they’re not, are they? Mr Average might rate a couple lines in the local rag. The media have long been entertainment platforms where “news” is treated as a product & coverage is more in the nature of commentary than reportage. Why should one be obliged to provide feedstock for their profits simply because one is wealthy or in the public eye & make good subject material?
” supposed rape allegation which might be real or might be horseshit– such is the sad marx-poisoned age we live in”
Its a measure of how far we have come that my 70yo mother (middle class Christian with strict views on crime and punishment) was relating a story about the young son of an acquaintance who was accused of date rape (and convicted) and even she was dubious as to whether the accusation was real or not. If someone like her is now questioning such accusations, you know the cat is out of the bag.
Paul Rain – “but there’s a bit of a difference between the Iranians who have stuck around under the less than ideal clerical regime *, and those who left for America or Israel.”
Not much, there isn’t. I think it was Harold Bloom who pointed out that not every refugee from Hitler was a good person and that Nazi ideology was introduced into the English speaking world by said refugees. Just as we took people like Zygmunt Bauman who was kicked out of Poland for being too Stalinist and Jewish.
“Obviously the Shah was better, but Khomeini is quite progressive by Muslim standards. Iran has been trying to discourage child marriage, even though Mohammed fucked a 9 year old and thus it is presumably acceptable for all Muslims to do the same.”
Iran might be trying to do that now but the Shah’s marriage laws – that raised the marriage age to 16 or so – were one of the causes of the Islamic revolution. Khomeini immediately dropped the age of consent to nine and you can marry a girl of any age in Iran although you have to wait for her to bleed before trying to breed.
A prominent Hillary supporter and since Trump’s election a loud supporter of Californian secession?
It couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke.
I am loving the way the Left keeps lashing out at Trump but hitting their own.
Incidentally, the NY Post – a vastly better paper than the NY Times – has this story running as well:
I think that in an ideal world a gentleman would not know there was such a thing as giving oral sex to women, but I have to say this seems an odd lapse in professional standards. I mean, it is not supposed to be about her is it?
She didn’t even kill him outright – which means if she is objecting because he couldn’t find some tiny obscure semi-mythical bodily organ, she is not too good at finding the bull’s eye either.
That NY Post article is a bit odd. The only name in the first paragraph is that of one of the accused’s business colleagues. We don’t get the name of the accused himself until the second paragraph. And no, I’ve never heard of him either.
The story was quite prominent on dailymail.co.uk this morning. It’s now vanished from there, but is still appearing in the Google AMP ‘carousel’
Someone’s received a bit of a bollocking I suspect.
Lotta Pish: I’ve never heard of the bloke. What’s the point of keeping a name secret if it’s unknown anyway?
Same thing happened in 2016 when you poor ignorant Brits were not allowed to know that Sir Elton John’s husband, a Canucki, was putting it about. But we in Canada heard all about it, too bloody much about it.
http://nationalpost.com/news/world/why-the-english-media-could-go-to-jail-for-reporting-on-the-olive-oil-trysts-of-elton-johns-husband
“What’s the point of keeping a name secret if it’s unknown anyway?” Is it an arsy-versy way of seeking fame?
Before we get uber-excited about this, we should remember that any details that are out there are likely to be partial. UK press restrictions are loopy. Hyper-loopy, in fact.
@SMFS, November 10, 2017 at 9:57 am
“…unless he is a little, you know, Vibrant.
“
He is: Shervin Pishevar, an Iranian-American venture capitalist
http://www.fastcompany.com/40493814/