‘Girl with a one track mind’blogger Zoe Margolis has won ‘substantial damages’from the Independent on Sunday after it referred to her as a ‘hooker’in a headline.
Press Gazette revealed in March that Margolis had decided to launch legal action against the paper after she wrote an article for it describing her alleged harassment by journalists after being outed by the Sunday Times in 2006 as the author of an anonymous sex blog.
In the first edition of the paper the article was headlined: ‘I was a hooker who became an agony aunt”, but that the word hooker was changed to “good-time girl” in a later edition.
She said at the time: “I’m absolutely distraught by this damage to my reputation both professionally and personally. Unfortunately this situation just shows how much work still needs to be done to challenge the sexism of the media in their conflation of female sexual desire with the sex industry.”
Today a statement on her website says the legal proceedings ‘have now come to a conclusion and substantial damages have been offered to Ms. Margolis for the distress and impact to her reputation, both personal and professional, that this libel caused”.
The statement says: ‘The resulting effect of this libel was immeasurable”.
An agreed statement in open court is due to be read out at the High Court in London today.
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