Legal News

John Terry: Playing away
Wed 3rd Feb 10 - 10:49

Maurice Chittenden, Times Online, January 31st 2010

The alleged affair between the England football captain and a team-mate’s ex-girlfriend puts Britain’s privacy laws on the spot.

As is allegedly his habit, John Terry scored away from home last night. This time he was helping Chelsea retain their place at the top of football’s Premier League with a late goal in a 2-1 win at Burnley.

Despite his goal, it was an uncomfortable game for Terry, the captain of both Chelsea and England. He was barracked from the moment his name was read out from the teamsheet to the final whistle.

During the warm-up, a stadium announcer had cheekily played Let’s Stick Together by Bryan Ferry. Later the home fans sang: “Same old Terry, always cheating.”

Until yesterday Terry’s alleged affair with Vanessa Perroncel, a French underwear model — and, more importantly, the former girlfriend of fellow England player Wayne Bridge — was just like any other episode of Footballers’ Wives, the television soap opera that centred on the sexual liaisons of players at the fictional Earls Park club. It was saucy tittle-tattle — and particularly embarrassing for somebody named Dad of the Year for 2009 — but hardly earth-shattering.

Nine days ago Terry’s lawyers, Schillings, applied for a so-called super-injunction to block reporting of the alleged affair. These draconian court orders not only halt the publication of the story in question but also forbid any reference that the injunction exists. Critics regard them as a significant block to freedom of speech.

Sir Michael Tugendhat, who has helped develop privacy laws, granted Terry’s lawyers a temporary injunction. What they did not know was that Tugendhat is a fan of Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII’s courtier, whom he reveres for his association with freedom of expression.

On Friday Tugendhat reviewed the case and, realising that anyone with a computer could find even more sordid allegations about the affair just a mouse click away, lifted the injunction. He said it was likely that the nub of Terry’s complaint was the protection of his financial arrangements and not of any other aspect of his private life.

He added: “Freedom to live as one chooses is one of the most valuable freedoms. But so is the freedom to criticise — within the limits of the law — the conduct of other members of society as being socially harmful, or wrong.”

In a judgment welcomed by freedom-of-speech campaigners, he criticised “routine” requests for super-injunctions.

The ruling left Terry, 29, reeling and cast doubts over his future as England captain. Fans will be concerned about the effect the alleged affair will have on team spirit ahead of this summer’s World Cup.

Terry will also be wary that sponsorships worth millions of pounds a year may be cancelled. More importantly, he will be concerned about his relationship with his wife, Toni, the mother of their three-year-old twins, Georgie John and Summer Rose.

In Tudor times it was the romantic entanglements of princes that led to changes in the law. More lost his head for opposing the king’s divorce and marriage to Anne Boleyn. Now it is the no less complicated assignations of professional footballers and other celebrities that are shaping privacy law.

THE romance is supposed to have started four months ago. Terry and Bridge were practically neighbours on a luxury estate in Oxshott, Surrey, until Bridge was transferred from Chelsea to Manchester City last January. Bridge and Perroncel had a son born a few months after Terry’s twins and the two families went on holiday together.

Terry, who picked up his Dad of the Year award in a Daddies sauce survey last year, could have followed Bridge to City, lured by the offer of a £200,000-a-week pay packet, but decided to stay behind.

So did Perroncel, unwilling perhaps to give up West End modelling shoots and the Wag haunts of Knightsbridge and South Kensington. She and Bridge officially separated in December but are believed to have called it a day last summer.

Yesterday the parties involved were batting away reporters’ inquiries. Bridge said his primary concern was the welfare of his son and that he would make no further comment. The publicity agent Max Clifford said he had spoken to Perroncel and she was “very, very upset”. Terry’s wife is said to have telephoned her on Friday demanding to know every detail of the affair but the model insisted they were “just good friends”. Terry did not answer questions when leaving Chelsea’s team hotel.

It is the latest in a series of embarrassments for Terry. He was once caught romping with another girl in Bridge’s house. He is rumoured to have a bad gambling habit and was exposed last year as receiving payments of £10,000 for giving private tours of Chelsea’s Surrey training ground. His mother and mother-in-law were cautioned last year for shoplifting and his father was exposed in November for allegedly offering cocaine to a reporter.

Many had questioned his suitability to be England captain and now Fabio Capello, the manager, has to decide whether to retain Terry in the role for the World Cup in South Africa. He must also ponder whether to take Bridge as cover for Ashley Cole, the first choice as England left back and another Chelsea star who has been in the doghouse for an alleged extramarital affair.

To make matters even worse, football insiders believe yet another England player may have tipped off Bridge about the relationship.

George Sik, a psychologist who works with footballers and wrote the book In Ma Head, Son with Pat Nevin, a former Chelsea player, said: “This is the not the kind of thing Bobby Moore would do. There is an unspoken code of loyalty in football, things you don’t do, such as scoring with a team-mate’s wife or girlfriend. This is a knife at the heart of the England team.”

Martin Keown, the former England defender, said yesterday: “Terry is a big, big player, but these indiscretions really need to be dealt with by Capello. He is a great disciplinarian and I think this is a chance for him to show that.”

Terry’s hopes of staying England captain are reasonable, however, if only because the other candidates are hardly saints themselves. Last night he was 4-9 to keep the armband with the bookmaker Ladbrokes. Steven Gerrard, who was last year cleared of assault and affray in a bar, was his closest challenger at 7-2.

The Football Association refused to comment. Chelsea said it was backing its captain and giving him and his family “all the support they need in dealing with it”.

Terry is also likely to keep his sponsorship deals worth more than £4m with companies such as Nationwide, Umbro and Samsung. Nationwide, the building society which has sponsored England for 12 years, said: “This is a private matter and not a matter for us.”

Clifford was sanguine about Terry’s deals. “This is not going to cause any problems with sponsors,” he said. “Can you imagine Samsung cancelling his contract and all the Chelsea fans stopping buying their phones?”

However, when Tiger Woods was exposed as a serial adulterer last year his sponsors gradually backed away from him as the revelations piled up.

TERRY’S prowess on the pitch as a defender is based on his mistakes being few and not catastrophic. However, legal experts say that he made four crucial errors in his legal battle.

First, his lawyers applied for the injunction as “LNS versus persons unknown”. It did not name Terry and using the phrase “persons unknown” meant that newspapers investigating the story were not informed and were unable to challenge the case in court. Tugendhat saw this as unfair.

Second, Terry’s lawyers drew attention to the potential loss of future earnings from his sponsors, rather than the effect on his wife and children. If anything was going to dissuade Tugendhat, a Catholic father of four, from the merits of his case it was that.

Third, Terry did not turn up in court to give evidence but relied on a witness statement from two business associates, thought to be his agents.

Finally, Terry asked these two to visit Perroncel, 33, the day before the first hearing to sign a confidentiality agreement to ensure her silence. In the contract, bizarrely signed for a nominal fee of £1, she said: “As a result of my dealings with you [Terry] there has been speculation about a relationship with you. Whilst I do not make any admission as to the truth or otherwise of such speculation, I do not want such information to be disclosed.”

What the lifting of the injunction is likely to do, legal experts predict, is stop the goal rush of super-injunction applications being used to protect the rich and famous.

This will have knock-on effects. If the “super” part of the injunction can be lifted, revealing the fact that someone has sought an injunction, it exposes the person to gossip on the internet and elsewhere.

Mark Stephens, the media lawyer, said: “As a result of a failed attempt to gag the world the lawyers have made a drama out of a crisis. It is an object lesson. Effectively the only person John Terry didn’t want to know was his wife. Now everybody knows and she has been cheated on publicly.”

Dan Tench, a partner in litigation at the lawyers Olswang, said: “This appears to be a significant retrenchment in the development of the law of privacy in this country. Procedurally, the judge set a high bar for John Terry’s lawyers which is new and which they weren’t able to meet. The media have been left with an old-fashioned 1970s sex scandal.”

The privacy law is developing fast and it will be months before the true fallout of the Terry affair is known. But for a few days at least the footballing hero of the tabloids is not Roy of the Rovers but Tugendhat of the Inner Temple.