Day 276 - 09 Jul 96 - Page 30
1 concerned with the group received, or the group itself
2 received, were when the five of us who were originally sued
3 received the writs in September 1990. There were no
4 letters before then to ask us to stop distributing the
5 leaflet or to say that McDonald's considered that the
6 leaflet was defamatory. The very first contact we had
7 about the fact sheet was the writs. And there was no
8 contact about any other leaflet as well, apart from this
9 one in 1984.
10
11 To me, the clear intention of McDonald's putting this
12 passage in their press release is to say to the public,
13 'Look how reasonable we have been and how unreasonable the
14 defendants are. They have ignored all our letters. We
15 were at the end of our tether. We had no choice but to
16 take this action', whereas the reality is completely the
17 opposite, that the first thing McDonald's did, as far as I
18 was concerned and as far as anyone was concerned with
19 regard to the fact sheet, was to issue writs against us and
20 to demand that we apologise otherwise the proceedings would
21 be continued with.
22
23 In the final paragraph on that page, where McDonald's
24 say that in September 1990 they "... wrote to the five core
25 members of the group, advised them that the leaflet was
26 defamatory and that proceedings had been issued. They were
27 invited to apologise and undertake to stop
28 repeating/publishing the allegations. As a result three of
29 the group did admit in court that the leaflet was
30 libelous. They apologised and undertook not to repeat the
31 lies."
32
33 I was well aware that the reason that the other three
34 people reluctantly decided to apologise was just because
35 when we went to get legal advise we were basically told
36 that it is extremely difficult to fight a libel case as a
37 defendant because the onus is on you to prove everything
38 from first hand sources not from reports in books or
39 medical journals or scientific journals, or anything like
40 that; that the libel laws were very complex and it was
41 extremely difficult to fight a case, and that if you had no
42 money you faced a nigh on impossible task and that you
43 would be lucky to even get to the trial itself. It was
44 more than likely that because you did not know the legal
45 procedures that you had to meet and you could not employ
46 somebody to draft all the documents for you, the pleadings
47 and so on, that you would fail to meet some pretrial stage
48 and that your case would be struck out before getting to
49 court.
50
51 We were told that the longer the case went on the
52 higher the costs would be, and so the advice was, well,
53 just the sensible thing to do in the circumstances is what
54 everybody virtually is forced into doing is to apologise
55 even though you do not believe that, you know that the
56 apology you are giving is justified. I am 100 per cent
57 clear in my mind that the reason those three people
58 apologised was not because they thought the fact sheet was
59 untrue, but because of the overwhelming odds stacked
60 against us in trying to fight this case with no resources
