The Vice Chancellor and the Cake Maker – Part 2

by reporting watch team | Mar 27, 2026 | Cases, FCReportingWatch | 2 comments

This is an update on the post we wrote on 18 March about family court and defamation proceedings relating to a high profile couple, Professor James Tooley and Ms Cynthia Tooley/Stroud MBE.

Two new judgments in Ms Tooley’s defamation case have been published – one regarding a claim against the publishers of the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, the other against the publishers of the Times.

The offending articles are online but we aren’t posting links to them here.

We’ll start with the case about the Mail because this is connected to our original post. We didn’t then know about actions against the other papers.

Cynthia Niruka Tooley v Associated Newspapers Ltd & Anor [2026] EWHC 683 (KB)

In this case, Ms Tooley was claiming against the Mail for three articles and the Telegraph for one. They all relate to a story about her being arrested following an argument with her husband (now ex-husband? Even the judges don’t seem to know).  Mrs Justice Steyn allowed the case against the Telegraph to proceed, but not those against the Mail.

The only reference to family court proceedings is from para 92 – Ms Tooley stated that one of the Mail articles had made an allegation of animal abandonment that was false and she identified the wrong as ‘conflict of interest or improper dissemination of information from family proceedings to the press’. The story had been about Ms Tooley’s lost cat.  However because the actions against the Mail aren’t going ahead, that question about whether someone involved in the family proceedings talked to the press about the cat no longer seems to feature.

Ms Tooley also made new applications for journalists to disclose their sources that were refused.

Cynthia Niruka Tooley v Times Media Ltd [2026] EWHC 675 (KB)

This is a judgment by Mrs Justice Steyn in some preliminary matters in the defamation claim against the Times. The judgment tells us that, at the end of 2025, Ms Tooley issued a claim against Times Media Ltd for libel and malicious falsehood regarding an article published on 8 February 2025, with the headline ‘Wife of anti-woke professor says she was ‘bullied’ by police’. The causes of action were (i) misuse of private information, (ii) breach of confidence, (iii) defamation and (iv) malicious falsehood. In this hearing, she was seeking an interim injunction against the Times, to make them take down the article.

We’ve looked for the family court issues in this one, but they are hardly mentioned. The claims about privacy and confidentiality are about a video Ms Tooley shared with people she trusted to keep confidential.

What’s interesting from a family court perspective though, is that Ms Tooley was objecting to the Times article in February 2025, although as Steyn J pointed out, this same information had been publicly available in DJ Nutley’s family court judgment, published in March 2025. Although Professor Tooley had wanted that judgment anonymised, Ms Tooley hadn’t. She then waited nearly a year after the Times story was published and the family court judgment had appeared on TNA and BAILII to apply for an injunction. For this, amongst other reasons, the injunction was refused.

Comment

From our point of view, challenges to a reporter’s obligation to protect a source of information are really important so we’re glad all the judgments support that principle of non-disclosure.

It remains to be seen whether this case will clarify anything about what can and can’t be reported about Family Law Act 1996 non molestation order proceedings.

There may also be some findings in future hearings about the extent to which it is ethical for a lawyer acting for one party in the family court to discuss details about the other party with the  press.

We have a small favour to ask!

TEN YEARS A CHARITY

The Transparency Project is a registered charity in England and Wales run by volunteers who mostly also have full-time jobs. Although we’ve now been going for a decade, we’re always working to secure extra funding so that we can keep making family justice clearer for all who use the court and work in it.

We can’t do what we do without help from you!  We’d be really grateful if you were able to help us by making a small one-off (or regular!) donation through our Just Giving page

2 Comments

1. Michael Freeman on 30 March 2026 at 12:23 pm What are your charitable objects ?

Reply

• Julie Doughty on 30 March 2026 at 3:33 pm These are published on our website. https://transparencyproject.org.uk/about-us/

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