Paper
apologises over article making untrue allegation that Sally Morgan used hidden
earpiece to scam theatre audience
guardian.co.uk,
Josh Halliday, Thursday, 20 June 2013
Sally Morgan: the TV psychic will receive £125,000 from the Daily Mail after it made an untrue claim. Photograph: ITV |
The Daily Mail has apologised and agreed to pay £125,000 in libel damages to a TV psychic
it falsely accused of using a hidden earpiece to scam a theatre audience.
Sally
Morgan, who has appeared on TV and on stage under the name "Psychic
Sally", complained that the article in September 2011 meant she had
"deliberately and dishonestly" tricked her audience in Dublin.
The
article, by the magician Paul Zenon, claimed that Morgan had used a hidden
earpiece during her performance in order to receive instructions and relay them
on stage as if they were messages from the spiritual world.
In a
statement at the high court on Thursday, the solicitor for Morgan, Graham
Atikins of the law firm Atkins Thomas, said the article had "caused
enormous distress" to the psychic.
"The
allegation contained in the article that Mrs Morgan cheated the audience in
Dublin is completely false and defamatory of her, " he told Mr Justice
Tugendhat.
"It
also caused enormous distress to Mrs Morgan, who decided, given the newspaper's
initial defence of the article, that she had no choice but to commence legal
proceedings against the publisher of the Daily Mail."
The
solicitor Brid Jordan appeared on behalf of the Daily Mail publisher,
Associated Newspapers, and apologised unreservedly for the hidden earpiece
claim "which it accepts is untrue".
Atkins told
the court that the article appeared in the Daily Mail "in the context of a
general attack on psychics as being charlatans".
The claim
about the hidden earpiece arose during a phone-in programme on Irish radio when
two women who attended the Dublin show said they thought they had heard two
crew members saying something which Morgan then repeated on stage.
Following
the claim, Morgan issued a statement debunking the claim as
"nonsense" and the theatre separately denied there had been any scam.
It later
emerged that the crew members who were said to be part of the setup were
subcontracted by the theatre and not members of Morgan's team.
Morgan, who
claims on her website to "see and hear dead people", first appeared
on TV with the ITV2 series Sally Morgan: Star Psychic in 2007. She went on to
front a number of shows, including Sky Living's documentary Psychic Sally Big
Fat Operation and series Psychic Sally on the Road.
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