Jurisdiction(s):
United Kingdom

FGX v Gaunt: High Court guidance on damages and civil scope for image-based abuse, including PTSD and internet clean-up costs, beyond CJCA 2015 s 33 (England and Wales)

Published on: 07 March 2023

Published by a LexisNexis TMT expert

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Article summary

FGX v Gaunt [2023] EWHC 419 (KB) What are the practical implications of this case?

The level of damages will not astonish media law specialists, who have been resolving comparable actions in this range for many years now. A scarcity of authority exists because these disputes are typically compromised at an early juncture (a defendant being on a hiding to nothing and courting serious and severe reputational damage by letting a claimant proceed to trial) or, alternatively, potential defendants have not been chased owing to worries about recoverability. FGX is a welcome decision, likely to discourage would‑be offenders, while giving claimant solicitors a citation to leverage in settlement discussions. Even so, practitioners should remember that these claims turn on their facts. In FGX, the court applied the eggshell‑skull principle: the consequences of image‑based abuse can differ markedly between claimants. In this instance, the claimant’s team placed cogent material before the court of psychiatric injury, distress, and the wider effect on the claimant’s life, together with evidence from an expert about internet ‘clean up’ work (which can always be advanced as part of a special damages claim). A claimant cannot merely emphasise wrongdoing or culpability. The dissemination of intimate images with...

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