I have covered the career of left wing journalist Carole Cadwalladr on this website for many years, starting with her bogus claims of achieving success despite educational disadvantage, moving on through all the hoax stories which earned her an Orwell prize and then onto her libel case with Brexit bad boy, Arron Banks. Today Cadwalladr faces bankruptcy as she has been ordered to pay 60% of Bankski’s costs plus 100% of her own costs plus some damages as well. If she cannot find more than £2million she should be made bankrupt. Hooray. For Cadwalladr is a dangerous and unpleasant fantasist.
Predictably, the mainstream media are not covering todays news though the MSM gave extensive coverage when Cadwalladr won an earlier round. In summing up the judge made it explicitly clear that Cadwalladr had lost and must pay the penalty.
The two biggest “scoops” of Cadwalladr’s career concern the supposed Russian hold on Donald Trump and it fixing the 2016 US election for Trump and also Russia fixing the Brexit vote. But we now know that the Trump dossier which kicked that whole farce off was paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and pushed by supportive Federal agents but was in fact completely untrue, pure fiction. And Cadwalladr has now admitted under oath that she has no evidence of Russian money swaying the Brexit vote or it coming in to the UK via Banks.
So she is a fraudster who has made a career of making things up and passing her work off as serious and groundbreaking journalism and if the liberal elitists who run the Orwell Foundation had any scruples they would demand she hand back her Orwell prize. They don’t and she won’t. Orwell would be laughing at the whole affair.
Cadwalladr may now be bankrupt. Again, the left say this will damage investigative journalism but printing defamatory comments that you have just made up is not investigative journalism it is bent and corrupt journalism. The bankrupting of the crazy Cat Lady might send out a message to other fantasists within the fourth estate and so start to clean up the cesspit that is modern day journalism. Cadwalladr is clearly shown to be a fraudster in her writings but this affair begs the question: has Carole Cadwalladr committed actual fraud.
The Guardian/Observer hack and darling of the BBC has raised several hundred thousand pounds to cover her costs, encouraging the sort of folks who tweet #FBPE next to a Ukrainian flag to hand over their hard earned to fight for “truth and brave journalism”. At the start of her crowdfunding Cadwalladr insisted that she could prove what she said was true and so just needed the cash to put a rich businessman, Bankski, in his place to stop him trying to gag a free press. And folks handed over cash on that basis.
Then she changed her defence to “I cant prove it but its in the public interest to flag it up.” That was a very unusual defence which would never work. How can a journalist make a very damaging claim with no proof at all just to create discussion. Eventually Cadwalladr had to admit in court under oath that her claims about Banksi were just untrue and to swear not to repeat them.
It is good that Carole has admitted what we all knew from the start but what is clear is that her initial statement, that she could prove her claims, was one that she knew when making it to be a lie. And folks handed over their hard earned on the basis of that lie. Surely they have been defrauded. Carole Cadwalladr has committed fraud.
This comes the same week as another darling of the left, the food poverty blogger calling herself Jack Monroe, was shown not to have sued for libel the rent a quote Tory MP Lee Anderson within the year in which she had to file papers despite raising vast sums via crowd funding, often from very poor folks, to launch such an action. Not even one letter was sent by Monroe or a lawyer acting on her behalf.
If Monroe and Cadwalladr were darlings of the right, the Met would be all over these two clear acts of fraud. That they are not (yet) says an awful lot about the Police.
The real trouble is that Arron Banks is too much of a nice guy so probably won’t be making an official compliant to the Police asking them to start a formal investigation. Perhaps someone else will. Because fraudsters deserve to be behind bars.