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
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