Vanity Publishing

Like most journalists, I am usually on the side of a defendant in a libel case. British libel laws are pernicious, have often been abused by crooks and bullies (whether as individuals or organisations) and need reform. But I cannot join in the general hand-wringing of media commentators after Roman Polanski's victory over Vanity Fair last week.

To recap briefly, Vanity Fair suggested that the film-director, en route to the funeral of his murdered wife, Sharon Tate, had slipped his hand up the skirt of a Swedish model in a New York restaurant and told her he could make her the next Sharon Tate.

Much of the story, as Vanity Fair later admitted, was wrong. The supposed meeting took place after, not before, the funeral; the model was Norwegian, not Swedish; and, according to the woman herself, who did not give evidence but was interviewed by the Mail on Sunday last weekend, Polanski neither touched nor propositioned her.

Having listened to the evidence for a week, the jury unanimously awarded Polanski £50,000. Vanity Fair is likely to end up with a legal bill of around £1m. It might have been cheaper to apologise to the director early on.

The reason that it decided to defend the action was essentially that it believed that Polanski had no reputation to defend. He was a fugitive from American justice, having skipped bail in 1978 while awaiting trial for statutory rape for having sex with a 13-year-old girl. He did not give evidence in Britain, but from France, via video link, because he feared that he could be extradited to stand trial in the United States. How, argued Vanity Fair, could a man with such a stain on his name complain about his reputation being besmirched?

Vanity Fair has been responsible for much fine journalism over the last decade. Its editor, Graydon Carter, has robustly challenged the Bush administration when many of his fellow editors have not had the courage to do so. But why did it choose to fight this case?

Whether someone should be allowed to give evidence by video link or sue an American publication in a London court is a side issue. At the heart of the action was the magazine's suggestion that Polanski had casually dishonoured the death of his pregnant wife by his behaviour. As my colleague Marina Hyde pointed out last week: "What sentient being ought really to sit in judgment on somebody's grief?" Should events around the murder of Tate by Charles Manson's gang become the subject of tittle-tattle for the entertainment of the latte-drinking classes decades later?

That, perhaps, is what the jury thought as they weighed up the evidence last week. There are many honourable cases when the media should fight libel actions, even if they know the odds are heavily stacked against them, and there are many cases that can be offered in evidence for drastically reforming our current system in favour of greater freedom of speech. The right to peddle inaccurate gossip about a man who has seen enough real horror in his life is not one of those cases.