Action woman

Part of the role of a supermodel, one imagines, is the ability to generate headlines, and indeed as the cliché goes there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Naomi Campbell, however, one continues to imagine, might disagree on that last point, on the evidence of the past few years anyway. This year she has found herself in the law courts in the Hague, giving evidence in the trial of the alleged mass murderer Charles Taylor. She has, of course, already found her place in English legal history, through her famous privacy action against the Daily Mirror.

The Mirror was headed at the time by a young editor by the name of Piers Morgan, fully cognisant of the English tradition of press freedom and freedom of speech, and not shy about asserting it. Nor, one speculates, would Mr Morgan have been reluctant to weigh the increased revenue from the anticipated extra circulation against the likely cost of litigation.

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