A judge has taken the unusual step of publishing an unanonymised and unredacted family court judgment involving Premier League footballer and England vice-captain Kyle Walker – after concluding that to anonymise or redact the judgment would have opened the court to ridicule.
His Honour Judge Edward Hess’s judgment in Lauryn Goodman v Kyle Walker appeared on the National Archives website yesterday. The case concerns a financial remedies application in relation to Goodman and Walker’s youngest child.
The judgment states that from the outset of the hearing, the judge received a request from three journalists to attend under the family court transparency pilot introduced at Central Family Court in January. Accredited journalists were allowed to attend the hearing and supplied with the parties’ position statements, the judgment states. Hess made an interim transparency order regulating what journalists could report in the meantime, with a view to making a final transparency order at the end of the case.
Lawyers for Associated Newspapers, whose views were supported by Walker, said Hess should allow the newspapers to publish, with some exceptions, information about the proceedings, including the judgment, without redaction or anonymisation.
Associated Newspapers also argued that the parties were well-known celebrity figures, there was already substantial reporting on their long-running dispute, and much of that reporting was the result of one or both parties putting information into the public domain.
However Goodman called for an ‘almost complete prohibition’ of publication of information, telling the court that any published judgment should be redacted and/or anonymised.
Declining the request, Hess said: ‘It would be a nonsense, opening the court to ridicule, to try to redact or anonymise this judgment to prevent identification of the parties… For me, on the facts of this case, the balancing exercise must come down against the mother’s argument. For me, the right of the press to scrutinise and comment upon the court’s procedures and decisions, and what the mother has requested of the father and how he has responded, are on this occasion a greater priority.’
Hess saw ‘no benefit to the children or anybody else in the court trying to impose restrictions’ to prevent reference to the ‘already widely publicised’ names of the children.
Hess added: ‘In these circumstances it is my view preferable that anybody interested in the topic should have the opportunity to read the full independent account contained in this judgment before reaching any conclusions about what has happened.’
