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The case of Stephen Belafonte v News Group Newspapers: what The Sun's article meant

The case of Stephen Belafonte v News Group Newspapers

/ Internet defamation law, Key cases by Yair Cohen / By / Leave a Comment

What The Sun’s article meant, decided by the High Court before anything else

Case summary

Stephen Belafonte is an American film and television producer. He was married to Melanie Brown, the Spice Girls singer known as Mel B, for about ten years until they separated in 2017, and their young daughter lives mainly with him in the United States. Since the separation Ms Brown has made a series of public allegations about the marriage. Mr Belafonte says they are untrue, and in 2024 he issued defamation proceedings against her in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Those proceedings continue, and nothing decided in England resolves them.

I act for him on the English side of the dispute. In June 2024 Ms Brown applied, without notice to him, for an emergency non-molestation order while he was visiting London with their daughter. The order was made on 21 June on her account alone. At the hearing on 27 June, once he had put in evidence answering what had been said about him, she withdrew the application and the court ordered her to pay his costs. I told that story in The case of Melanie Brown (Mel B) v Stephen Belafonte.

On the same day as that hearing, The Sun published an article online under the headline “MEL’S PAIN”, and in print the next morning as “Spice Girl’s ex-hubby faces cop quiz on claims”. It opened by telling readers that Mr Belafonte “faces being questioned by UK police over harassment claims made by her”. Around that it set out allegations attributed to Ms Brown and to unnamed sources about the marriage, said she was “living in fear” of him, referred to a restraining order in the United States, and described two things said to have happened during his visit to London: a drone flown over her home and a messenger sent to her door with legal papers.

So a national newspaper told several million people that my client had harassed his former wife, in the same week that a court had declined to make the order she had asked for against him. We issued a libel claim against the publisher, News Group Newspapers Limited. It is worth being clear about what that claim is. It is not a way of deciding what happened inside the marriage; that is what the Florida proceedings are for. It is a claim about what a newspaper told its readers about him, and whether the newspaper can justify it.

What the court decided

In a libel claim the court decides the meaning of the words first, as a preliminary issue, and everything that follows is built on it. “Meaning” is a term of art. It is not what the journalist intended and not what the person written about took from the piece. It is the accusation the article actually made, in the eyes of the ordinary reasonable reader, written out by the judge in a sentence or two. That sentence becomes the case: it is what the newspaper has to defend, whether as true under section 2 of the Defamation Act 2013, as honest opinion under section 3 or as publication on a matter of public interest under section 4, and it is what the claimant has to show caused him serious harm under section 1. Since section 11 of the same Act removed the presumption in favour of a jury, a judge decides meaning alone, usually at a short hearing.

Where an article reports an accusation rather than making it outright, the courts grade it on the scale set in Chase v News Group Newspapers: level 1 says you did it; level 2 says there are reasonable grounds to suspect you did it; level 3 says there are grounds to investigate whether you did it. The level decides how much work the newspaper has to do. To defend a level 1 meaning as true it has to prove you did it. To defend a level 3 meaning it only has to show there were grounds to look into it, which can sometimes be done by pointing at the existence of a complaint.

Our case was that the article made two level 1 allegations: that Mr Belafonte was guilty of harassing Ms Brown in the United States, and that he had used a visit to England with their daughter as cover to harass her here, by the drone and the process server. The newspaper argued for something much lower: grounds to investigate the United States allegations, and on the London incidents grounds to suspect that the two things happened, with whether they amounted to harassment left as a matter for investigation.

Mrs Justice Collins Rice heard the preliminary issue in the Media and Communications List and handed down judgment on 11 February 2026. She applied the principles collected in Koutsogiannis v Random House: the governing principle is reasonableness, the reader is neither naive nor avid for scandal, the article is read as a whole, and over-elaborate analysis is to be avoided. She read the article as a reader would, once and quickly, and recorded her first impression that it “was offered (and would be consumed) as a brief item of celebrity gossip” which an ordinary reader “would absorb in a matter of seconds before moving swiftly on”. She declined to treat it as a legal document, and she treated the Chase levels as “points on a spectrum rather than rigid and mutually exclusive categories”.

On the United States allegations she accepted our case in full. A reader would be struck by the headline and conditioned by it, would take “living in fear” as an unqualified statement of fact, and would take the reference to the restraining order as meaning that Mr Belafonte had given cause for it by persistent misconduct towards Ms Brown. That is a level 1 allegation of guilt, and it was “too lawyerly and over-analytical” to suppose that a reader scanning a gossip item would draw fine distinctions about the different bases on which such an order might be made.

On the London incidents she landed between the two positions. The drone and the process server were reported baldly, so a reader would not doubt that they happened, but the article did not itself connect the drone to Mr Belafonte beyond Ms Brown’s fears about him, and readers unfamiliar with the rules of service would not necessarily see a choice about how to serve papers as gratuitous. The article was, on this part, “more contextually circumspect and provisional”, so the meaning was level 2: grounds to suspect. She rejected our contention that the article accused him of cynically exploiting his daughter’s visit; that, she said, was “an extrapolation of scandal beyond the reaction of an ordinary reasonable reader”.

The single natural and ordinary meaning she found, at paragraph 41, is that Mr Belafonte is guilty of having harassed Ms Brown in the USA, and that there are grounds to suspect that during a later visit to the UK he caused a drone to be flown over her home and caused a process server to visit her unnecessarily, and accordingly grounds to suspect him of harassing her in the UK. Both sides had already agreed that the article made allegations of fact and was defamatory at common law.

Case outcome

The meaning is fixed. On the historical allegation the newspaper is held to the most serious level, guilt, rather than the grounds to investigate it argued for, which means that nothing short of proving the allegation will defend that part of the article as true. On the London incidents it is held to grounds to suspect. The claim against News Group Newspapers continues on that footing, and the Florida proceedings continue separately.

What the court has not decided is whether any of it is true. A meaning ruling settles what the article said about my client; it does not settle whether what it said can be justified. That comes next.

Lawyers’ thoughts about the case

Two things I would draw out of this judgment for anyone who has been written about by a newspaper.

The first is that the meaning hearing is not a formality on the way to the real case. In my experience it is the real case. Getting the level right, and arguing for it properly, changes what the other side has to prove, and it changes it before a penny has been spent on disclosure or witnesses. A claim that looks marginal at level 3 can look very different at level 1, and a newspaper that has to prove guilt is in a very different position from one that only has to show that somebody had complained.

The second is about how judges read online articles. When you have been written about, the temptation is to read the piece forensically, weighing every clause and every qualification. Judges deliberately do not read it that way. They ask what a reader taking it in at speed would come away with, headline first, and that reading is sometimes more damaging than the careful one and sometimes less. In this case the loose, quick reading that the law requires was the reading that found guilt. Understanding that difference early is usually what decides whether a claim is worth bringing at all.

Learn more about the case

The judgment decides only what the article meant. The libel claim continues, and the allegations made by Ms Brown, which Mr Belafonte denies, are the subject of proceedings in the United States that have not been determined.

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