Behind the scenes of the Guardian’s libel battle with Noel Clarke

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, the women who took on Noel Clark.

0:20A quick warning before we start. As you might imagine, given the nature of the allegations against Noel Clark, This episode contains graphic descriptions of sexual misconduct.

0:33So when I first met Noel, it was at Bournemouth Comic Con in 2016. I was about 27 and I was his guest assistant, so I was looking after him that day. This is Lisa Graham. She'd worked at Comic Cons for years, chaperoning film and TV stars as they met their fans. And they're like, FYI Lisa, you're with Noel Clark today. And I'm like, OK, cool. I know who he is. I am a Doctor Who fan. Noel Clarke's big break was playing Mickey in Doctor Who during the Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant era's. When Lisa met him, he was 40 years old and had made a name for himself as a writer and director with a trilogy of films inspired by his upbringing in West London, kiddlethood, adulthood and brotherhood.

1:18He was really friendly, but he was quite childish. He reminded me of the boys when I had gone to university, who were like 18, 19 years old, who were just thinking that they were funnier than they were. So yeah, in the beginning I was like, okay, he's cool, we're chatting. And then as the day progressed, it was as though every time he'd get bored, he'd just slide further into really inappropriate behaviour. It began with comments about fans at the convention. rating women out of 10 and making comments like, oh yeah, I'd do her. And then a very heavily pregnant woman walks by and he basically turns around to me, like staring me in the face and goes, 10 out of 10 would bang her because I can't put another baby in her.

2:14He said the same thing when another pregnant woman walked by. And then he turned his attention to Lisa. he was bored like less people will come into him and he would just be like oh hey you know let's let's go have sex and I was like I have a boyfriend he's like oh what he doesn't know about isn't gonna hurt him and I was just like no I'm no I'm not interested and he didn't stop he just repeatedly kept pointing and being like let's go have sex let's go have sex let's go have sex to the point where you realise that it's not a joke, that he was being deadly serious. Then he touched her. His hand came, splayed, and touched my thigh, like, between my legs on my inner thigh.

3:03And it was so close to my panty line that I remember just kind of pulling away and I had moved my chair at, like, an angle away from him, but I could only move it so far while still doing my job. That moment is just like burned into my memory.

3:26Lisa couldn't forget what happened. Meanwhile, Clark's career soared. And in April 2021, he received a special BAFTA for his outstanding contribution to British film. A few weeks later, Lisa clicked on an article on The Guardian website. It was headlined Sexual Predator. Actor Noel Clark accused of groping, harassment and bullying by 20 women. I just had the crazy urge and I reached out to the journalists and was like, hey, just so you should know, he did this to me. And if he did this to me, then he's very likely had done this to other people. More articles and an episode of Today in Focus followed.

4:12But Clarke said that Lisa, and all of the women quoted in the series of articles, were lying.

4:24Four years later, she found herself in the witness box of the High Court, after Clarke sued the Guardian for libel. Thanks to her, and the bravery of 25 other people who came to court for us, Clarke lost the case. Journalism, and the truth, won. From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pidd. Today in Focus. Behind the scenes of The Guardian's libel battle with Noel Clarke.

4:53Shirin Kale and Lucy Osborne, you are the two investigative reporters who worked on the original articles about Noel Clarke. And you both spent most of the last four years dealing with the aftermath. It's every journalist's nightmare being sued. Tell me, when did you first find out that Clarke was taking you and The Guardian to court? Shirin, you go first. I will always remember having to call Lucy to give her the news because Lucy had just given birth to her son. She was in hospital. So we found out that he was suing us and then obviously Lucy wasn't there for that because she was otherwise engaged.

5:30And then someone had to call her to tell her because it was going to end up in the press probably that weekend and I didn't want her to read about it in the newspaper. so I always remember just saying hey don't suppose you've got five minutes for a phone call do you and I think Lucy knew that yeah I think you knew that something bad had happened and I just had to go for the news. And what was the time frame of the allegations how long did his behavior span? The first allegation we reported I believe was in 2004 and the final allegation we reported for the first article was in 2019. Subsequently in further reporting we did uncover allegations that were more recent.

6:08I believe the last one was 2021. And there was remarkable uniformity to all of these accounts. By way of example, Lucy and I separately spoke to two women. One was based in the US and one was based in the UK. They'd never met each other. They both told us that Nile Clark said to them that he wanted to climb them like a tree. Jeez. I remember when we realised that we had heard that from two completely unconnected sources. it's just so specific and what was really clear from our reporting was that Clark's behavior escalated I believe as he got more influential and more powerful within the industry and as he had more control over his projects which is part of the reason that we felt it was really important to do this reporting because we didn't feel that this was historic we felt like it was ongoing and give us a sense of of the range of allegations that you heard so the allegations ranged from bullying to sexually inappropriate comments in the workplace, sexual harassment, the inappropriate taking and sharing of explicit images to inappropriate sexual touching.

7:15There are certain themes that you can see across quite a few of the allegations. The one that really stands out to me, I think, is the sense of humiliation that was involved in so many of these cases. Just to give some examples, women who were filming sex scenes who he asked to sort of bend over in front of the camera or to straddle a male actor where her anus was on show that was something that was never going to be used so many of these allegations also related to this inappropriate sharing of sexual images one of the key allegations in our first article which was that of Johanna James who he asked her to do a naked audition and then he recorded that and showed it to other people secretly recorded it without her realizing yeah

8:05and in order to defend the claim you were going to have to call upon many of the women who had spoken to you some of them had gone on the record but some of them were anonymous weren't they in the original articles what was that like having to call them up and say we're being sued will you come to court for us? Yeah it was hard because we'd already asked them to go on the record for the original story and that was a really big decision for a lot of them. So to then have to go and ask them will you be a witness for us I think it was really hard. And they're not compelled to right? Yeah they have nothing to gain from it.

8:39They're doing this because they think it's the right thing and because they feel really strongly about what happened. I cannot believe the courage of these women. I think we had 26 truth witnesses who came to court in the end for us but more people also signed sworn statements. What was also really difficult is that Lucy and I had really close relationships with these sources. And because Lucy and I were also witnesses in the case, we couldn't speak to them. We don't feel that our responsibility to our sources ends when we publish something, checking in with them, making sure they're okay. And then Lucy and I couldn't even speak to them during that process.

9:13So we had to completely cut contact with them. And it's only now the trial's finished that I've been able to speak to some of these women. They subjected themselves to huge amounts of stress and anxiety multiple women told me they were having panic attacks in the one up to trial one witness had a panic attack on her way to court and still went up and gave evidence incredibly brave for no gain you know just just to speak the truth in court and say that these things happened to them and they were factually reported and so I don't think I will ever not just find that one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen in my life.

9:56One of those women was Lisa Graham. The Guardian were clear from day one, like, if he takes us to court, we are going to court. We are not going to pay him off. Like, we're going all the way to court. But it was really reassuring to know that if I'm going to give this statement and I'm going to kind of put myself in an uncomfortable position that at least the guardian was standing by us and they didn't say oh actually we'll just retract it because that would be the easier thing to do because that would have been so much worse for us it's bad enough that we had to be branded liars by him and by his lawyers but the guardian always stood by us and what we said when it got closer to trial it was very much like yes we want you to give evidence but you know you don't have to give evidence I realised that there was power in my truth and that if I didn't go to court I felt like in a way I would have been letting down the journalist but also letting down myself because I'm the only person who can say for certain like this is what happened and so by the point where they'd set the trial dates I was just like I'll be in court like I will be there

11:19So the trial starts and Noel Clarke is the first witness. How did he approach the whole case? His defence was mostly along the lines of I didn't do any of these things that I'm accused of had I done them. They've been taken out of context. That seemed to be the overarching theme of his defence. He dismissed it all as harmless banter. He was very fond of presenting this all as, oh, well, you know, this is just how people used to behave. And, you know, the 2000s and 2010. And, you know, I've grown and I've had children. I'm a family man now. And this is this is just a bit of playful banter in the past.

11:52And that sort of consistent downplaying of really serious allegations is just a sort of bit of a harmless joke was a very common theme as well in his defense. He was aggressive towards the women. in some instances he dared them to come to court yeah he even got his lawyers to send one of the women a legal letter didn't he threatening to report her to the police and she went by the pseudonym Imogen Clark had propositioned her at a work dinner when she was a 20 year old aspiring actor he told her that he wanted to have sex with her in very graphic terms and implied that he was going to go to the bathroom to masturbate over her and she found this legal letter terrifying and it actually motivated her to come to court for the Guardian.

12:39Yeah, he sort of repeatedly say that women were coming forward because they wanted to sort of jump on the Me Too bandwagon, or that they were doing it for attention. Our barrister questioned him on that at one point and said, this woman came forward with a pseudonym, she's not even come forward with her real name. How could she be doing that for attention? And he said, I think something along the lines of, well, she wants the comfort that comes with coming forward and speaking to a Guardian journalist. And what else did he think was motivating these 26 truth witnesses? They were part of a conspiracy to take him down.

13:14Right. Why would they do that? Professional jealousy, bitterness, vindictiveness. One of the women was a fantasist who was obsessed with him. Another woman was... Jealousy came up again and again. They couldn't handle his success. They were just jealous that he'd got the BAFTA and they hadn't. Yeah.

13:32Lisa it finally came time for you to go into the witness box tell me about that day I arrived at court and I had tears like streaming down my face because and I wasn't sad I was pissed off I was furious that he had weaponized our legal system to the point where we had to come and defend our own honor it just felt really backwards um and so I was so angry and even then like the guardian were like you don't have to go to court today and I was just like oh no I do like I I even with the tears yeah I was like I am in court today for myself I was like I am in court today because he does not get away with sitting on that stand lying through his teeth making up ridiculous allegations against me and I there's a part of me that feels like that's why he did it because he wanted to set the narrative he wanted to tell the story that we were all evil and that we were all out to get him and I'm sat there being like I have come to court despite the fact that you were literally causing me mental health issues like I was having panic attacks the month before the trial i was so mad what had he said about you specifically with me he when he got on the witness stand he told the court that i a random stranger who'd only just met him decided to talk about my sex life now i'm a very private person i don't talk about my sex life with my own partners okay he basically denied that he'd ever touched me and he also denied that he had been rating women out of 10 but then during his own testimony he was forced to admit that he had actually been doing that I just remember thinking like you just need to sit here and as long as you sit there and tell the truth nothing can trip you up and I was just sat there being like I have nothing to gain from coming forward and talking to the guardian okay do you know the only thing I have gained from the past four years is stress and a few extra gray hairs

15:51Shirin, Noel Clarke was his own main witness wasn't he he didn't manage to persuade many other people to come to court though did he the majority of the people who gave evidence for him were long-standing friends and family including his wife yeah and six people who'd given supportive statements about Clarke pre-trial didn't even show up did they One of them, a guy called Arnold O. Cheng, he was an actor who appeared in Brotherhood and Adulthood alongside Clark, even ignored a witness summons, which is potentially very serious. Did you feel that Clark himself owned any of his behaviour? I sometimes had the feeling with Clark that he didn't remember some of the allegations or the incidents in question.

16:30And one of them was Talia Hamby Fisher, who met with Clark to discuss a potential children's book that she was hoping that he could do the audio recording of. And during this lunch, he asked her to go to the toilet and take a picture of her vagina and send it to him. And Talia was a witness in court for us. I thought she was incredibly credible, really clear. And Clark, although he initially absolutely denied that this had happened, subsequently admitted under cross-examination that he might have made that comment, but it was just a cheeky remark. Right. A cheeky remark to ask somebody to go and take a photo of their vagina in a work meeting.

17:09And there was another witness who met Clark through Twitter. She was an 18-year-old Doctor Who fan when they first met. And she was asked by Clark to send explicit photographs and messages to him, which she did. I always remember one of the messages that Clark sent in response to her. I think at this point she was 19 years old, a Doctor Who fan, very starstruck by him, was that he wanted to be the first to fill her. Oh, God. And Clark said in cross-examination that it was completely normal practice for male celebrities to solicit explicit photographs from fans on Twitter and that everybody was doing this in the 2000s on Twitter and this is all very normal.

18:00let's talk about some more of the witnesses who came to corroborate the guardian's stories one of the women who came to give evidence was gina powell tell me about her gina was probably one of our most important witnesses and was also probably one of our most important sources in the initial article. Gina worked for Clark very closely. She was a producer on the film Brotherhood and her most serious allegation was that Clark sexually assaulted her during a work trip to LA. Gina's allegations were really, really important because she not only had multiple experiences of either sexual harassment or sexual assault by Clark, but she was also a cooperative witness for numerous other women and her evidence was really really moving because she talked about the reasons that she was in court and that she felt this extreme guilt for working for Clark for so long and not calling out the behavior sooner.

19:01Another of the accounts that really struck me involved an actor who in court was called Penelope that's not her real name. So Penelope is somebody who acted with Clark in one of his films and she alleged that he during the filming of a sex scene showed her his erect penis and said this is what you do to me and then during the filming of the scene when he was on top of her having previously insisted that she be completely nude from the waist down so not wearing modesty patches which are industry norm protective bits of fabric that cover your genitalia he then during the filming of the scene showed her his erection and then was rubbing his erect penis at the entrance to her vagina, which made her feel as if he was going to penetrate her.

19:48There was one moment in her cross-examination where Park's barrister suggested that it was very normal for actors to get erections during the filming of sex scenes, and Penelope pushed back very hard on that, said that she had never had that experience as a professional actor.

20:09Clark, when he was on the stand, created this very elaborate explanation for why it wasn't possible that this alleged incident took place. So Clark said that's not possible, because we only shot a very limited number of takes for a very short amount of time. And also in the room was a very famous cinematographer who was there throughout the whole process, and he would never, ever have allowed anything like what has been described to have happened, because he was there throughout filming, so this definitely did not happen. Penelope when she gave her evidence said very clearly that cinematographer was never in the room for this we shot many more takes than Clarke said and it would actually be completely impossible to shoot this sort of scene in only a few seconds as he said because you wouldn't get the coverage that you need the other thing that Penelope said which has really stayed with me is that over the years many people had contacted her friends people in the industry to ask her what her experience of where Akeem Clark was like.

21:06And she said that she had always said the same thing, which is that that man would be his own undoing.

21:19And so it finally came time for you two to give your evidence and be cross-examined by Noel Clark's barrister. And Lucy, you were up first. So tell me, what was it like? So it was across three days. I think I was up there for longer than any of the other witnesses. A big thing about mine, which is something that popped up with a lot of the witnesses, was that it was a conspiracy and that all these women had decided that they wanted to bring him down and were conspiring against him, suggesting that I had an agenda, that I sort of wanted to publish the next big Me Too story. And therefore, I was just happy to sort of just go along with whatever I was told and that I didn't keep an open mind.

21:54I must have said this like three or four times that the process of corroboration for a journalist isn't just trying to find positive stories that confirm what witnesses are saying. We're also trying to find any information that might do the opposite, that might deny or that might cast doubt on what those people are saying because you want to get the full picture. You don't want to publish allegations that are later going to lead to this. Shirin, tell me what it was like for you. What really sticks in your mind? It felt that they were uninterested in my journalism and more interested in attacking me personally.

22:27I was also told effectively that I was only hired to work on this project because I'm a woman of colour. And I should say that I was accused of lying maybe ten times. And by that I mean told you are a liar, you are lying, you are a liar. Even on very minor factually provable points. Yeah, that must have been infuriating.

22:56and now that you've brought this story into the world and now it's taken up four years of your life you've defended it in court I wonder how you reflect on what it takes to get these stories out there and why it felt so important for you to do this story at the time I think that this story is so important but I also think what it represents is a bit bigger. We, The Guardian, published this reporting knowing what the possible consequences of that could be and then we also chose to defend it all the way through a really really expensive libel trial and so I'm just immensely proud to work for an organisation that firstly publishes this sort of journalism but also defends it in court.

23:39I really mean that I am really really proud that we did it because sometimes you actually just have to stand up to bullies and I think that's what we did but it has come at a cost and I think that the greatest cost has been borne by the women who gave evidence in court for us it was really hard for them on the stand the line of questioning was very aggressive I felt misogynistic at times and so I have sometimes felt that what they went through was I don't know how to express it it's a bittersweet feeling

24:29Lisa finally at the end of August the judgment was handed down tell me about reading it how did you feel? the night before I remember seeing like a news thing that effectively said no clerk judgment due tomorrow at 10 30 so I didn't sleep very well that night there's a part of your brain that is just so hardwired to women not being believed so that morning I literally at like 10 31 a.m was scrolling the judicial website to find the judgment and I just remember I opened the media copy and it was like libel failed so I may have jumped out of bed and went to where my partner was and I was just like he's lost he's actually lost it's it's over it's actually over um and honestly I think when I first read it I didn't really take it in the judge basically said what Lisa said happened I feel like her judgment is very clear that she believed what we said and she did not believe what he said.

25:37Do you think a judgment like this will give courage to other victims of sexual harassment? I think it will, only in that it's such a strong judgment. And I hope that other people see what happened in this trial and take strength from the fact that if somebody is trying to use a legal system to silence people, that you don't have to be afraid of it because if you know that you're telling the truth, if you know that what you're saying is true, you cannot buy the legal system. It was an open secret in certain production houses that Noel behaved in an inappropriate way, so we have to examine how was it allowed to be an open secret and what do we need to do to prevent that happening in the future.

26:32The judgment when it came was 224 pages. The judge believed Lisa and the women who came to court for us and said that the eight articles the Guardian had published about Noel Clarke were substantially true and in the public interest. The judge wrote, there are strong grounds to believe that the claimant is a serial abuser of women, That he has, over 15 years, used his power to prey on and harass and sometimes bully female colleagues. That he has engaged in unwanted sexual contact, kissing, touching or groping, sexually inappropriate behaviour and comments, and professional misconduct. Taking and sharing explicit pictures and videos without consent, including secretly filming a young actor's naked audition.

27:14She found Clark had committed a serious abuse of his position as a director while filming the sex scene with Penelope. and that he had indeed sexually assaulted Gina in the lift in Los Angeles. She added, The strong impression that I gained is that Mr Clark felt he could sexually proposition any woman he wanted. She dismissed the idea that there was any sort of conspiracy to bring down Clark.