A celebrity doctor tweeted an allegation that Northern Ireland’s first minister was having an affair just as she was in talks to restore power-sharing in the province, a court was told yesterday.
Christian Jessen is being sued for libel by Arlene Foster, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), over the tweet he posted on December 23, 2019.
Foster told the High Court in Belfast that the incident came at a stressful time in the negotiations. She added that the claims about an affair with a close protection officer — which she said emerged online from anonymous accounts before the tweet by Jessen — were designed to destabilise her at a critical time.
Jessen is best known for co-presenting Channel 4’s Embarrassing Bodies and currently has more than 311,000 followers on Twitter.
The first minister, 50, said that she had to sit down with her two elder children, then aged 17 and 19, to discuss the Twitter comment. She did the same with her mother, then aged 85, to assure them that the rumour was not true.
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“It was not a conversation that I would like to repeat,” she told the court, adding that the experience had made her “very, very upset”.
Foster told the court: “Having to speak to my husband and explain to him what had happened, because this gentleman has a large following, so this was going to go quite far and wide . . . It was very humiliating, I have to say, to see that the relationship that is most important to me had been trashed, if you like, and got put out there in the public domain in that fashion.
“There wasn’t much sleep on the night of December 23.”
Foster told the court that she and her husband decided to take legal action “because this was only going to continue to grow”.
Foster gave evidence saying that the rumours suggested that she had moved out of the family home and was living in a hotel, that her husband was living in a separate hotel and that the family had broken down.
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“Those closest to me of course knew that it wasn’t true, but they were asked questions by other people,” she said.
The court heard that Jessen, 44, responded to a tweet by Foster’s solicitor Paul Tweed on Christmas Eve, putting him on notice about the content of the tweet, with the short form “lol”, which means “laughing out loud”. He then responded to an email from the solicitor on January 7 and removed the tweet.
The court heard there was a “further aggravating tweet” on December 26 in which Jessen wrote he was being compared to Barbra Streisand, saying, “This gay boy’s life cannot get any better”, which was accompanied by exclamation marks and a number of emojis.
This was described by Foster’s legal team as a “sneering tweet”. However, Jessen has not responded to correspondence since, the court heard.
Foster told the court that she becomes “very distressed” when she is referred to as being homophobic.
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The DUP opposed attempts to allow same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland but it was extended to the region by legislation at Westminster while Stormont was suspended.
Foster was asked in court if she took the “traditional view of marriage” that it is a union between a man and a woman. “Yes, I take the traditional view, the church-based view, yes,” she responded. Asked if she was homophobic, Foster responded: “No.”
There was no representation on behalf of Jessen in court yesterday. David Ringland QC, acting for Foster, told the court that he had been notified several times of the proceedings but the response was “head in the sand, completely ignoring, not responding”.
The judge reserved judgment but said that he would seek to deal with the case as a “matter of urgency”.