Taking Them to Court

It was made known this week that TSH Prince Albert II and Princess Charlene of Monaco are taking another culprit to court for the effort to ruin their wedding celebrations. They have filed a 300,000 pound lawsuit against the Sunday Times for libel after the paper printed sensationalist rumors accusing the Sovereign Prince of every sort of ridiculous underhanded behavior. Of course, we all know the source of this slander (and the source has been dealt with in court as well) but papers like the Sunday Times were complicit in the smear campaign and printed all this unfounded gossip without the slightest bit of journalistic integrity, fact finding or the checking of sources. Of course, if they had bothered to do even a single internet search on the source of these wild stories they would have seen that they all originated with a blatant charlatan with a long history of fraud and extortion and bizarre conspiracy theories to his credit. Yet, it was not checked and the paper mindlessly reprinted these accusations that Prince Albert was highly involved in organized crime, that he willingly turned a blind eye to rampant corruption in the principality and, perhaps most hurtful of all, that he had basically bribed Princess Charlene into marrying him -a slap at her character as well as his own.

The Princely couple have said, quite rightly, that the story caused them great distress, particularly at a time that was supposed to be the happiest day of their lives, embarrassment and damage to their reputations. They are also seeking aggravated damages because the paper obviously made no effort to check their facts before printing such malicious rumors just in time to coincide with the wedding celebrations that all Monaco had been looking forward to for some time. That point cannot be stressed enough because, again, if the paper had made even the slightest effort to scrutinize the story they would have seen that there is absolutely no evidence at all for any of the gossip and the source of these stories was someone proven to be a fraud and with a hateful obsession towards Prince Albert and anyone around him. I hope when their day in court comes they obtain every satisfaction (as they so far have in dealing with these matters because the "evidence" to support the allegations simply does not exist). I hope the punitive damages are sufficient to make papers in the future think twice about printing baseless and hurtful gossip simply to make a quick a buck. They will doubtlessly wail about "freedom of the press" but, make no mistake about it, this has nothing to do with that. Speaking truth to power is what freedom of the press is supposed to be about and that should always be protected. Spreading obviously false rumors to slander a newlywed couple hardly applies.