Katie Hopkins And Jack Monroe Libel Case Prompts Twitter Sparring

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Jack Monroe and Katie Hopkins have continued to spar after the ruling in their High Court libel action on Friday, trading blows against each other’s “principles” on Twitter.

The controversial MailOnline columnist kept quiet about the case until Saturday when she posted a tweet imploring her supporters to fight on and attached a screen grab of a comment Monroe made about David Cameron in 2014.

The tweet in question was posted as part of a hashtag campaign against the then-PM, positing reasons why he should resign.

It said: “Because he uses stories about his dead son as misty-eyed rhetoric to legitimise selling our NHS to his friends: #CameronMustGo

Cameron‘s son Ivan passed away in 2009 as a result of severe epilepsy and cerebral palsy.

Monroe was heavily criticised at the time for the comment. They later said they stood by their comment but added: “I didn’t do it in the most sensitive manner but you know Twitter is a fairly limiting place to try to express yourself.

“I regret not thinking about it a bit harder but we all do things that when you look at the next day that you go ‘I could have done that a bit better, or a bit more sensitively.’”

Monroe hit back at Hopkins on Saturday with a dig at the fact Hopkins had failed to attend to High Court hearing.

Monroe then addressed the issue that the tweet appears to have since been deleted. It is no longer viewable on Twitter but was posted under a different handle to the Monroe currently uses.

In the early hours of Sunday morning Monroe posted their own version of Hopkins’ original tweet listing numerous achievements.

Monroe, a food blogger who also campaigns over poverty issues, was awarded £24,000 damages after suing Hopkins over tweets they said caused “serious harm” to their reputation.

At the heart of the action was a posting on Twitter in May 2015.

Monroe, who identifies outside the binary construct of gender and prefers the gender-neutral pronoun ‘they’ and title ‘Mx’, said the tweet meant they had either vandalised a war memorial, and “thereby desecrated the memory of those who fought for their freedom and had committed a criminal act”, or that they “condoned or approved” of the criminal vandalisation of a war memorial.

The judge also ordered Hopkins to pay an initial £107,000 towards Monroe’s legal costs within 28 days. The final costs figure has yet to be assessed, but some legal experts put it above £300,000.

Also this weekend a spoof fundraiser for Katie Hopkins raised so far more than £7,000 for charity.



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