HAZEL LAWLOR, the widow of Liam Lawlor, the former Fianna Fail TD, is suing the Sunday Independent for libel over its coverage of her late husband’s death in a car crash in Moscow five years ago.
A front-page story in the newspaper in October 2005 wrongly said Lawlor had died in the company of a woman who was “likely to be a prostitute”. A picture of Lawlor with Hazel and their niece Glenda Gilson, a model, was printed beside the story.
Lawlor lodged her libel action with the High Court last Thursday. Under the defamation law that applied before January 1, 2010, there is a time limit of six years in which legal action can be taken.
Sources close to the family said Lawlor is suing for damages on the grounds that the story breached her privacy and caused her “massive trauma”. She is alleging the Sunday Independent was negligent in publishing the story because it knew before going to print that Julia Kushnir, a female passenger in her husband’s car, was not a prostitute.
Kushnir, a Ukrainian legal secretary based in Prague who worked as Lawlor’s translator, received an estimated €600,000 in settlements after suing the Sunday Independent and five other newspapers through the High Court in Dublin in 2007. She received minor injuries in the crash that killed Lawlor and Ruslan Suliamanov, the car’s driver.
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Just before the first of Kushnir’s libel trials was due to begin in 2007, five newspapers — the Sunday Independent, the Sunday Tribune, the Sunday Mirror, the Irish Independent and the Sunday World — agreed to pay her substantial damages. In apologies read out in court, lawyers for the newspapers said they were happy to say Kushnir was a respectable family woman who had no involvement in prostitution. They said the allegations against her were “totally false”.
The Observer agreed a settlement before the cases came to trial. Lawlor is employing Brian Lynch & Associates, the same firm of solicitors used by Kushnir in her six cases.
Pat Long, Liam Lawlor’s former driver, was prepared to give evidence in the Kushnir libel proceedings to say he rang Jody Corcoran, a Sunday Independent reporter, on the day of crash to tell him the woman in the car was an interpreter. Corcoran has denied this happened.
Independent News and Media (IN&M) carried out an investigation of its coverage but has refused to release the findings. It is likely that Hazel Lawlor will seek discovery of this document. The newspaper claimed in the run-up to Kushnir’s case that the report was legally privileged The story in the Sunday Independent was partially based on an interview carried out by Nick Paton Walsh, then an Observer journalist based in Russia, who spoke to a Moscow police spokesman. A transcript of the interviews released after the Kushnir settlements shows that the policeman warned Paton Walsh that it would be wrong to assume the woman in the crash was a prostitute.
“If we would say she is a prostitute we would accuse her with no evidence,” said the policeman.
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Paton Walsh said his police contact emphasised it was only a possibility that the woman in the crash was a prostitute. The reporter said he had “no hand” in drafting the Sunday Independent story based on his interviews.
The Sunday Independent’s front-page story carried the headline “Lawlor killed in red-light district with teenage girl”. Kushnir was 29 at the time and the crash occurred on one of the main thoroughfares from Moscow airport.
The Sunday Independent printed a front-page apology for the story. Aengus Fanning, its editor, said: “Our coverage last week of the tragic death of Liam Lawlor in Moscow was wrong and inappropriate and it was a mistake on my part to publish it. It was not our purpose to add to the grief and distress of a bereaved family. Our handling of the matter revealed a serious lack of judgment and compassion.”