Legal
In 2005, Lewis-Smith took legal action against The Independent newspaper after it queried the impartiality of his television reviewing; the newspaper published a retraction. In June 2006, Gordon Ramsay, his production company, and his producer accepted an out-of-court settlement of £75,000 from Associated Newspapers, after an article in London's Evening Standard written by Lewis-Smith alleged that Ramsay had faked television scenes and installed an incompetent chef. Ramsay said at the time, "We have never done anything in a cynical, fake way." However, a year later, Channel 4 admitted that a scene in another of Ramsay's programmes had been faked, and apologised to viewers.
On 28 July 2006, hypnotist Paul McKenna successfully sued the Daily Mirror for libel over articles written by Lewis-Smith from 1997 alleging that Mr McKenna was in the possession of a false PhD, having obtained the qualification from a non-accredited institution in the United States, whose principal had since been imprisoned for making misleading claims about the status of degrees he handed out to candidates.
Read more about this topic: Victor Lewis-Smith
Famous quotes containing the word legal:
“If he who breaks the law is not punished, he who obeys it is cheated. This, and this alone, is why lawbreakers ought to be punished: to authenticate as good, and to encourage as useful, law-abiding behavior. The aim of criminal law cannot be correction or deterrence; it can only be the maintenance of the legal order.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)
“Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“It has come to this, that the friends of liberty, the friends of the slave, have shuddered when they have understood that his fate was left to the legal tribunals of the country to be decided. Free men have no faith that justice will be awarded in such a case.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)