Fighting Laurence Westgaph cost us £75,000. Help us to get it back

Dear readers — Abi and Laurence here, with a special newsletter in which we are going to request your backing for something we think is very important.

As many of you will know, we recently triumphed over TV historian Laurence Westgaph in a year-long legal case. Westgaph had attempted to use data laws to make us reveal our sources for a series of investigative pieces we published at the start of 2025. The pieces alleged that National Museums Liverpool (NML), the biggest cultural organisation in the city, had hired Westgaph as a resident historian despite being warned about his record of “sexual and domestic violence”. We had spoken to a dozen sources as part of our reporting process — several of whom were former partners of Westgaph.

The conclusion of the trial was a triumph for us and a triumph for press freedom. A less triumphant sight was the state of our coffers at the end of the ordeal. We’d been left £75,000 worse off.

So let’s talk numbers — and exactly what that sum means. 

The Post currently has 2,100 subscribers paying £75 a year, roughly. This gives a total annual income of £157,500 from our members — not including comparatively smaller amounts from things like ad revenue and event income. 

So, that £75,000 figure, the cost of our court proceedings, is the equivalent of 1,000 members paying their subscription fee for a year. It’s only £4000 below half of our annual sub income.

This poses a major threat to the journalism we want to do. It makes hiring much harder, it makes ensuring freelancers are well-paid much harder, and — perhaps most frighteningly — it makes us far more vulnerable in the face of future law-suits. 

As our readers well know, investigative work is a core part of The Post’s output. As local news has been hollowed out over the past few decades, this type of journalism has been one of the great casualties.

In the past couple years, alongside the Westgaph piece, we’ve published pieces like Abi’s widely-shared inside look at the Writing on the Wall Festival, or the Baltic scammer investigation. And loads more to boot. It’s little wonder Abi has been nominated for the Paul Foot Award in two consecutive years, an almost unheard of feat. 

But this kind of work does create a situation in which individuals and companies, many of whom are very powerful and with lots of money at their disposal, have it in for you. In the past few weeks alone we’ve received four separate legal threats. While most of these are utterly spurious, we need to be in a position where we can continue to fight these where necessary. 

Since we announced the result of the Westgaph case, we’ve been inundated with supportive emails and comments from members and non-members asking for ways to help us. 

Lots of you also volunteered to chip in and many asked if we have a crowd-funder set up or plan to. 

Instead, what we intend to do is to run a little campaign over the next two weeks. Our aim is to try and make back roughly a third of what we spent fighting Westgaph. The logic behind this figure is that it will cover roughly our final outstanding legal bill — which is a little over £20,000. This obviously still leaves us at a sizable loss, but as the rest of the bills have already been paid and absorbed, and we didn’t want to ask for too much, this figure made the most sense to us.

Here’s how it will work:

If you are not already a Post member we’re offering the opportunity to sign up to The Post for £4.50 for your first two months — as an extra little incentive to back us at this critical moment. This will essentially give you a trial period during which you can walk away having never paid full price. But if you choose to stay you’ll be helping us build up our membership base and recoup the lost income from fighting off Westgaph. 

In total, we’re aiming at 300 backers, either upgraded existing members or brand new ones. Alternatively, you can make a one-off donation to The Post’s fund.

We’re aware that this amount in two weeks is very ambitious — we have absolutely no idea if the target is realistic or pie-in-the-sky. But we do think (as well as being a life saver for us) it would send a very strong message to the likes of Westgaph and others who try to leverage the legal system to bully small publishers. 

We hope you chose to support us.

Many thanks, 

Abi and Laurence 

If you’d like to read the answers to frequent reader questions, click here.