Topless photos of Holden land 'Daily Star' with £165,000 bill
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Your support makes all the difference.The publication of topless photographs of the actress Amanda Holden taken while she was at a holiday villa has landed the Daily Star with a £165,000 bill.
The case is the latest brought by celebrities who have used the Human Rights Act to protect their privacy.
In an out-of-court settlement, Ms Holden and her husband, Les Dennis, accepted £40,000 in damages as well as an estimated £75,000 in legal fees. Express Newspapers, which owns the Daily Star, will have to pay its own legal costs, estimated to be £50,000. Yesterday the paper also published an apology.
The pictures were to be part of a two-day feature that first ran on the day of the 7 June general election. Both Ms Holden and Mr Dennis said they were shocked when they saw the pictures because they were taken while they were staying in a private villa in Tuscany. Lawyers for the couple immediately won an injunction preventing any publication of the pictures the following day.
Earlier this year the Court of Appeal recognised that the publication by Hello! magazine of unauthorised photographs of the wedding of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones was a "powerfully arguable case" for invasion of their privacy. Since then a stream of celebrities, including, Anna Ford, Naomi Campbell and Sara Cox, have tried to use the Human Rights Act to keep the paparazzi at bay.
But yesterday media lawyers warned that the courts' willingness to broaden the law of privacy threatened the freedom of the press.
Mark Stephens, a leading media and human rights lawyer, said that taken with a recent decision by a judge to ban the publication of sexually comprising photographs of a well-known, but unnamed footballer, the law was developing to support the interests of the celebrity at the expense of the rights of the press.
Peter Crawford, the solicitor acting for Ms Holden and her husband, said the Daily Star tried to argue the photographs did not amount to an invasion of privacy because the Italian garden was visible from a public track and the camera was not equipped with a long lens.
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