Narinder Kaur v Laurence Fox: High Court rules on meaning in 18 publications and refuses delivery up of photograph

Five of eighteen publications complained of in a libel claim brought by the broadcaster Narinder Kaur against Laurence Fox were held not to be defamatory of her at common law, several because the words did not refer to her at all in their natural and ordinary meaning.

In Kaur v Fox [2026] EWHC 1743 (KB), handed down on 10 July 2026, Mr Justice Linden determined the preliminary issues ordered by Steyn J and refused an interim application for delivery up of a photograph at the centre of the wider dispute. A separate strike out application directed at the claims in misuse of private information and data protection was adjourned by consent, the defendant reserving his position pending amended particulars.

Reference, and the absence of an innuendo plea

The claimant is not named in five of the publications. No innuendo reference was pleaded, and no facts were advanced from which those acquainted with her would understand the words to refer to her.

That omission proved costly. In respect of two publications, both of which criticised charging decisions rather than the claimant, Linden J declined even to express a hypothetical view on meaning, there being no pleaded case as to what the hypothetical reader would have known about her. In a third, a rambling livestream monologue in which the claimant was not named, the words complained of did not refer to her, and would in any event have registered as vulgar abuse within a general diatribe about the press.

Applying Koutsogiannis, Stocker v Stocker and Monir v Wood, the judge emphasised the impressionistic character of social media. The hypothetical reader is a representative follower of the defendant's account, who scrolls rather than parses.

Abuse, opinion and the threshold of seriousness

Two further publications failed the consensus requirement or the threshold of seriousness. In one, a quadrant of photographs captioned with an assertion that a white woman would have been charged with indecent exposure, the reasonable reader would see an opinion about perverse policing, not an imputation against the claimant. Another added nothing material to the tweet it followed.

Elsewhere the defendant fared less well. A tweet describing the claimant in crude terms was held to be vulgar abuse in part, but the surrounding words conveyed that she was insincere, mercenary and unprincipled, and that association with her would damage others. That was defamatory. So too were assertions that she had staged the photograph, sold explicit images of herself, and made a false report of sexual assault to the police, the last carrying an imputation of criminality.

Where statements of opinion were found defamatory, section 3(3) of the Defamation Act 2013 was satisfied in each case. The claimant did not argue otherwise.

Delivery up refused

The photograph, published by the defendant in April 2024, shows the claimant without underwear. He is awaiting trial in December 2027 on two counts under section 66A of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. He denies wrongdoing and nothing in the judgement determines those charges.

The application sought delivery up and deletion of all copies, together with an affidavit identifying the source and the members of a WhatsApp group.

Linden J refused it. The claim form pleaded no cause of action supporting the relief, and the misuse of private information claim was unsatisfactory, pleading neither the basis of a reasonable expectation of privacy nor any balancing of rights. The order would serve no useful purpose two years after the image spread widely, and the defendant needs a copy to defend the criminal proceedings. Section 10 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 applied to the source disclosure sought, and Hourani v Thompson is not confined to journalists. An application to restrain further publication, raised orally when difficulties with the drafted order emerged, would engage section 12 of the Human Rights Act 1998 and could not fairly be entertained without notice.

Delay ran throughout. Proceedings were issued a day short of a year after publication, served four months later, and the application, said to be urgent, was not put before the defendant for another two months.