Court of Appeal holds misleading ‘sex pest’ headline is unlawful in landmark decision

In Vince v Associated Newspapers Limited [2026] EWCA Civ 899, the Court of Appeal held that a newspaper headline and the juxtaposition of the Appellant’s photo was unfair to him and misleading to a subsection of readers, and thus in breach of the UK GDPR, despite the full text of the article setting out the accurate position.

In a landmark decision, in a claim believed to be the first of its kind in Europe, the Court of Appeal held that the rule in Charleston v. News Group Newspapers Ltd [1995] 2 AC 65 did not preclude the Appellant from succeeding with a claim for unfair processing of his personal data where a libel claim would (and indeed did) fail. The rule in Charleston requires that a libel claim may only be founded on the whole of an article, rather than selective parts. It has previously been applied to claims for the processing of inaccurate personal data under data protection legislation.

The claim concerned newspaper articles which featured two prominent Labour donors. One of them was the Appellant green energy industrialist and environmental activist Dale Vince. In June 2023 the Daily Mail and Mail+ had published two articles which Mr Vince claimed unfairly juxtaposed the headlines “Labour repays £100,000 to sex pest [or sex harassment] donor” alongside his picture, when the “sex pest donor” referred to was not Mr Vince, but another Labour Party donor.

Mr Vince’s original libel claim had failed because of the rule in Charleston, but a data protection claim for the unfair processing of personal data was also issued before determination of the libel claim. Both Mr Vince and the Mail’s publisher Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL) applied for summary judgment. On 9 June 2025 Mr Justice Swift granted summary judgment for ANL and also struck the claim out as an abuse of process (Vince v Associated Newspapers Limited [2025] EWHC 1411 KB).

In the Court of Appeal, Vos MR, Warby LJ and Whipple LJ unanimously agreed that the High Court decision should be reversed, with summary judgment being granted in favour of Mr Vince. In reaching this decision, the Court held that the juxtaposition of the photographs of Mr Vince alongside headlines referring to a “sex pest donor” or “sex harassment donor” would cause anyone who did not read the full article to believe that Mr Vince was the “sex pest” concerned. Because it was likely that many readers do not read beyond headlines and pictures, the Court found that they would have been misled. The Court noted that under section 12 of the Human Rights Act it was obliged to take into account the Editors’ Code of Practice which provides that newspapers “must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information or images, including headlines not supported by the text”. The format of the publications rendered the data processing unfair regardless of whether the article was accurate or not (in a legal sense), which the Court of Appeal did not comment on. The Court of Appeal considered the potential applicability of the UK GDPR’s journalistic exemption and held it could not apply on the facts of the case.

The abuse of process finding was overturned because, inter alia, the data protection claim had been advanced in the initial Letter of Claim, there was no delay in intimating it would be pursued if the libel claim failed, it was novel, Associated Newspapers was a seasoned litigant and could not reasonably be considered to be oppressed, there was no real difference between applying to amend the original proceedings and initiating a second claim and because Mr Vince was “simply trying to obtain a remedy for what was an obvious injustice perpetrated by a wrongdoer who was taking every possible legal point against him”.

In the circumstances, the claim was to be remitted to the High Court for an assessment of damages.

The decision is far-reaching as it means that editors of newspapers and websites (including those not regulated by IPSO) must take care to ensure that newspaper headlines and the placement of photographs are not misleading. If they do not, they risk incurring legal liability regardless of the rule in Charleston.

The full judgment can be found here.

Press coverage: The Guardian, BBC News, Press Gazette, Solicitors Journal, Law360, Lexology.

Dale Vince was represented by Iain Wilson and Tom Double, and Aidan Eardley KC and Greg Callus of 5RB.