Attorney's Say They Could Sue Media Outlets For Releasing Their Names

British police late last week arrested, and then released without charging, a man and a woman in connection with the drone scare that effectively shut down Gatwick Airport for about 36 hours in the days before Christmas.

The two were arrested in the town of Crawley about five miles south of Gatwick Airport, according to a report from NBC News. They were initially not identified by authorities, however at least one newspaper, the Mail, ran a story on Sunday identifying the two as 47-year-old Paul Gait and 54-year-old Elaine Kirk with the headline "Are These the Morons Who Ruined Christmas?" Several other newspapers published the names of the two who had been taken in for questioning.

While that paper and others were still on the street available for purchase, the two were released by Sussex police without being charged.

Gait and Kirk later went public, making a Christmas Eve statement outside their home. They said the had been "completely violated" by the arrest and subsequent media coverage. The U.K. newspaper The Guardian reports that Gait said “Our home has been searched and our privacy and identity completely exposed. Our names, photos and other personal information has been broadcast throughout the world.”

Good Morning Britain host Piers Morgan called the two "clowns" during a broadcast segment, and suggested they were "terrorists". He has since apologized for the remarks.

But libel lawyers in the U.K. say that Gait and Kirk have a strong case against the media outlets who released their names and personal information.

Mark Stephens, the head of media law at Howard Kennedy, said that the case could be the first major test of a landmark privacy ruling against the BBC earlier this year which makes it more difficult for media outlets to release the names of people who are arrested but not charged. “Absent of a compelling reason and the police saying you can, you may no longer identify people who have been arrested," Stephens said. “The damage is likely to be in the region of £75,000 to £125,000. It could be more when you total all of the news outlets, because each one is going to pay something for the damage it caused. I don’t see any lawyer who wouldn’t take it on a no-win-no-fee basis.”

(Images from file)

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