Deny with lies: court allows journalist in supermarket shoplifting ‘reply to attack’

MaltaToday managing editor Saviour Balzan’s appeal on a defamation suit filed against the former Times journalist Ivan Camilleri, was thrown out, after the first Court decided that the former journalist’s falsities on a shoplifting incident, were not sufficiently defamatory to Balzan, who authored the story.

In the defamation case, Valyou supermarket director Ray Mintoff confirmed to the court that Camilleri had paid back the supermarket a total of €5,000 over previous incidents of shoplifting.

MaltaToday cleared of two libel cases by former Times journalist Ivan Camilleri

But an Appeals Court confirmed the first court’s judgement, saying that Camilleri was entitled to a “right to attack” statement even if his claims might themselves not be truthful.

Chief Justice Mark Chetcuti cited case law and legal scholars to highlight the inharmonious privilege of “reply to an attack”, in which statements of people who feel they are “attacked” are considered privileged.

The reply to an attack allows a response from such subjects which should “not... cross over into an attack on the integrioty of the claimant if it is not reasonably necessary for defending his own reputation.”

It was this that Saviour Balzan challenged in his defamation suit.

But the Court said that “no matter how harsh, hasty, untrue or libellous the publication would be... the law declares it privileged because the amount of public inconvenience from the restriction of freedom of speech or writing would far out-balance that arising from the infliction of a private injury.”

The testimony in the Camilleri defamation suit originally confirmed MaltaToday’s story on Camilleri’s shoplifting of items of value from the Naxxar supermarket.

Valyou (now Wellbees) director Ray Mintoff had threatened to report Camilleri to the police. over a series of shoplifting incidents

 Times of Malta editor Herman Grech told the court that in December 2019 – weeks after the MaltaToday story had first been published – he confronted Mintoff about the allegation against the newspaper employee. It turned out that Mintoff had claimed that the value of goods stolen was well into the €12,000 figure and that the shoplifting had been ongoing for years. Allied Newspapers director Michel Rizzo was present at this meeting.

Ivan Camilleri, who testified via a sworn affidavit, claimed to the court that he had “forgotten to place certain items of value at the bottom of the trolley under some packets of water” on the cashier’s conveyor belt. He said it was “an unfortunate incident”.

Camilleri then claims Ray Mintoff called him days later with a threat to report the incident to the police, and that – “feeling blackmailed and that it was not in his interest that this case is revealed” – decided to pay him €5,000.

On 19 December, Grech and Rizzo accused Camilleri of not having told them the truth, and he was sacked from his job, with The Times retracting its previous statement defending the journalist.

Balzan filed the defamation suit against Camilleri’s denial of the story on Facebook, in which he accused the managing editor of lying, by requesting to seek the preservation of CCTV footage inside Valyou Supermarket as evidence.

A Court of Magistrates decided this would not prove Camilleri’s statements being “defamatory” – “Not every false statement is necessarily defamatory,” Montebello said.

The court said it was not its role to decide whether the shoplifting incident had indeed happened, but whether Camilleri’s statement on Facebook denying the story as “an invention and a lie and full of inaccuracies” was defamatory.

Camilleri, in his impugned Facebook statement, had accused Balzan of tarnishing the reputation of “serious people who spent their lives fighting what is wrong”. Balzan felt this was defamatory in his regard as a journalist.

But the court found that in his testimony, Balzan had conceded that he was “not in it for Camilleri’s pound of flesh... I’m not interested in bringing him down further” – so the first court felt the plaintiff was not interested in moral damages. “His interest is in determining that the story he penned is indeed the truth... then he does not believe his reputation suffered damage from the defendant’s statement.”

The first court declared that Camilleri’s statement, “though an attack on the plaintiff’s bona fide intentions”, was reasonably expected for his defence.