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  1. Media Law
May 31, 2011

Journalist signed gagging order on date with Schilling

By Press Gazette

Journalist Sarah Oliver has said that she was handed a confidentiality agreement to sign on her second date when she went out with super-injunction lawyer Keith Schilling.

Writing in the Mail on Sunday, Sarah Oliver reveals that she was handed a typed document to sign over the coffee table at his Hampstead home. And she said that she handed him £1 to make it legally binding.

She said she met Schilling on a blind date in the late Nineties making up a foursome for dinner at the Oxo Tower restaurant in London and that Schilling drove her home in his red Ferrari (which broke down).

Oliver was a feature writer for the Mail on Sunday at the time she went out with Schilling. She said that their relationship lasted just a few weeks.

Despite signing the agreement, Oliver said that Schilling remained discreet about his work and said that ‘his life would remain a closed book with his work 100 per cent off-limits”.

Schillings is one of a number of London law firms to have done well out of a UK system for libel and privacy cases which is among the most expensive in the world.

In 2004 the Daily Mirror was handed a costs bill of £594,000 after Schillings represented model Naomi Campbell for a two-day House of Lords appeal. They successfully argued that pictures of her leaving a Narcotics Anonymous meeting were a breach of privacy.

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