Family Law and the Media: how to ‘keep the lid on the worst of this, rather than lifting it off’

Marcus Dearle, Miles Preston

Marcus Dearle, Senior Partner at Miles Preston and immediate past Chair of the IBA’s Family Law Committee, is one of the UK’s leading advisers on high conflict, high profile family law disputes. Drawing on decades of frontline and international experience (including in Hong Kong), his latest Family Law Risk Advisory article calls for ‘deterrence with “teeth”’: to ‘prevent conflict before it starts’.

Dearle argues that the real, often ignored victims of publicised separations are children, who experience visceral emotional harm when parents promote their private disputes through memoirs, mainstream media, or social platforms.

Recent attention to Andy Webb’s book, Dianarama, which focused on criticism of Martin Bashir and the BBC concerning the notorious Panorama interview, has reignited debate - but Dearle contends that the deeper problem actually began decades earlier with Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story, which ‘set the hare of this harm running’ in the first place.

The full article has published in the January issue of Family Law. 

Read the full article here.