London – English law forbids publishing lurid allegations in divorce cases – an inconvenient but not insurmountable impediment to splashing the latest dispatches from the war of the McCartneys.
The leak of a document bristling with allegations of physical and emotional cruelty by Paul McCartney marked a low point in Britain’s most sensational marital bust-up since Prince Charles and Princess Diana parted ways a decade ago.
The accusations against the former Beatle include drug use, drunkenness, callousness about his wife’s amputated leg, indifference to her pain and even an assault with a broken wine glass.
Sensational stuff, but aside from the Daily Mail, most of Britain’s normally scandal-hungry press waited hours to jump in. There were fears about the legal consequences of repeating allegations of criminal acts and about violating privacy rights.
A law dating from 1926 that forbids publication of details in divorce cases, uncertainty about whether it really was a court document apparently drafted by Heather Mills McCartney’s lawyers, and the mystery of who leaked it ultimately only delayed publication.
“The old law had reached the end of its useful life. But it never foresaw this,” said Duncan Lamont a media specialist at the law firm Charles Russell in London.
To obtain an amicable divorce, which the couple initially said they were seeking, Mills McCartney need only have filed a brief response to McCartney’s petition alleging an irretrievable breakdown.
The only purpose for lodging such an extensive response “would be to leak it,” Lamont said, adding that Mills McCartney and her legal team could easily have obtained an injunction to block publication.
The law forbids publication of court proceedings, which are conducted in private.
“Why are we finding these unbelievably apocalyptic allegations?” asked divorce lawyer Vanessa Lloyd, adding: “Nobody really understands quite why it was done in this fashion.”
Lloyd believes the leak in the McCartney case was “a public relations disaster” for Mills McCartney.
Piers Morgan, former Daily Mirror editor who claims to have introduced the couple to each other, agreed.
“The picture the documents paints is of a self-obsessed, demanding, selfish, whining woman, apparently intent on making Paul’s life as unhappy as possible,” Morgan wrote in Thursday’s Daily Mail.
