Chris Bovey is a businessman and co-founder of NORML UK, and was sued, along with myself, Alun Buffry, and Greg de Hoedt by Peter Reynolds last year. To date, Alun Buffry has chosen to settle out of court, Greg has not yet been served with the court papers, and I won judgement and costs in November. This week, Chris had his first hearing and has also had the case struck out with costs awarded. Chris kindly agreed to an interview in order to publish his side of the story.

Me and Chris outside the Royal Courts of Justice.
So, what happened in a nutshell?
Last February, I received a defamation writ from the Royal Courts of Justice issued by Peter Reynolds. I knew it was nonsense, however, when you get a lawsuit taken out against you, you can’t ignore it. The case has dragged on for nearly a year and last Thursday my legal team made an application to have Peter Reynolds’ entire case struck out. They succeeded, it was struck out and he was ordered to pay my legal fees, which are to be determined at a date in the near future. [click to continue…]
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royal courts of justice
2013 was a year filled with stuff. I did an internship with Yachad, started my MSc, and spent a whole bunch of time in between those things sitting around in my room trying to work as a writer. Oh, and I got sued.
This blog also saw some changes. When I built it back in 2009, I was blogging weekly, then life (and my degree) intervened and I gave it up for a while. Then, as I started getting published elsewhere, I started posting my pieces here. This year I did a monthly column for Lesbilicious on LGBT rights and religion, and was featured on Channel 4’s 4Thought programme talking about Pride.
With my writing reaching a larger audience than ever before, that put my blogging into perspective and I announced in June that I wouldn’t be putting as much effort into blogging in the future. What that has meant, in reality, is that I still spend hours on each post, but they’re on more trivial or personal subjects, like my review of the Digital Marketing Show or the number of computer games I own.
That’s turned out to have really worked for me. I have no idea how many people even read those posts because I never checked the stats, but it doesn’t matter. I feel much more free to post what I want, when I want and even so I’ve still posted 19 times this year, and I’d have posted more if I had more spare time than I do. My topics are broader and I’ve been experimenting with new styles of writing. So I’m going to stick with the same in 2014 and see how it goes. [click to continue…]
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