- What was The Post’s original reporting?
The Post published a long investigative piece in January 2025, revealing that National Museums Liverpool (NML), the biggest cultural organisation in the city, had hired Laurence Westgaph as a resident historian despite being warned about his record of “sexual and domestic violence”.
Abi’s reporting also suggested NML didn’t act on several other warnings about Westgaph during his employment there. In response to our story, NML said it had not received “any internal formal complaints about his behaviour” but it launched an investigation and encouraged colleagues to come forward. It later said this probe showed that NML “acted in line with its policies” in the appointment of Westgaph, but it “identified ways it could strengthen its internal policies and procedures”.
The Post’s reporting was based on detailed interviews with more than a dozen sources, including women who had been in relationships with Westgaph in the past. You can read the full story here.
- What was Westgaph’s claim and why did it fail?
In March last year Laurence Westgaph got in touch with us, trying to find out who the women Abi had spoken to during her reporting were and what they had told us. He sent a Subject Access Request (SAR), which is a statutory right that allows any person to find out if an organisation is processing their personal data and to request a copy of that data if they are. It stems from a piece of EU legislation called the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, which came into force in 2018.
The SAR request asked that we send Westgaph “all personal data you hold about me”, including any correspondence mentioning him. He also wanted us to hand over “any information regarding the source(s) of allegations published about me.”
This part — about information regarding his sources — was crucial. It went beyond the purpose the legislation exists for, and in court we argued that we had a journalistic right to protect our sources. As the evidence in court showed, Westgaph had shown an obsessive focus on the women who he suspected had spoken to Abi. In an email to one of our editors in June last year, which he sent to her personal email, he referred to one of his former partners by name. “I now require the following,” he wrote, demanding that she “provide full particulars of all communications you have made to third parties concerning me”. If she didn’t comply, he threatened: “I will immediately apply to the High Court for an injunction against you”.
After hearing his evidence, the judge told Westgaph she didn’t believe his argument that he hadn’t been trying to identify our sources: “I have to say that his attestations at court are not supported by the contemporaneous documents.”
- Why is Laurence Westgaph not being made to cover your costs?
We think the costing judgement at the end of the trial was rushed, and given Westgaph’s argument was comprehensively rejected by the judge, he should have been made to cover most if not all of our costs. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. As it is, the reality is that to appeal would cost us several thousands of pounds more, and Westgaph would likely never have paid up even if he had been ordered to. It didn’t seem worth elongating the process for likely no material gain.
- Why 300 backers? Surely that still leaves you at a significant loss?
Realistically, we have to accept that most of the costs we’ve paid to our lawyers to this point are lost. That’s about £50,000, which is too large a sum to go to readers to help recoup, and we’ve absorbed that amount into our annual finances. We’re lucky that our parent company, Mill Media, has several backers, so we were able to use money from a fund-raising round last year to help there. But, by the end of July we have our final legal bill to pay, which is around £20,000. That amount would equate to roughly 300 backers in this campaign — if we’ve done our maths right! Given how many people have reached out offering support since we published an overview of the Westgaph case, it made sense to us to ask for help with what is remaining of the bill.
- What else can I do?
Our parent company, Mill Media, has spent the past year campaigning against what are known as SLAAPs: Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation. These are meritless legal claims brought against publishers with the intention to intimidate or waste time and money via lengthy legal proceedings. To this end, we’ve given evidence in parliament and were featured at length in a piece in the New Statesman exploring this issue — which can be read here. We think a lot more needs to be done on this though. The deputy Prime Minister, David Lammy, has promised action against groundless lawsuits which seek to silence public interest reporting. You can write to your MP about this, or find out more here.
