A high court judge banned the Sun from printing pictures of Kate Winslet's husband that showed him partly naked at a fancy dress party because of the "grave risk" that the film star's children would be teased and bullied at school.
Mr Justice Briggs granted a privacy injunction brought by Ned Rocknroll against the Sun last week and explained his reasons in a written judgment published on Thursday.
David Sherborne, for Rocknroll, told the high court on Thursday that the case had now been settled. News Group Newspapers, the News International subsidiary that publishes the Sun, has signed an undertaking agreeing not to publish the information, which also binds other media groups.
The judge ruled there was no public interest in allowing the Sun to publish the pictures and that they would not add "anything beyond mere titillation" to public debate.
He said Rocknroll's right to privacy should be protected because the Sun's wish was "simply to satisfy the interest of its readership in the private peccadilloes of the rich and famous or (in this case) of those associated with them, rather than to contribute, as watchdogs, to public debate".
The court decided that Rocknroll's right to privacy trumped the Sun's right to freedom of expression under the European Convention on Human Rights.
Rocknroll, who changed his name from Edward Abel Smith, married Winslet in a low-key ceremony in New York in December. He applied for a high court gagging order earlier in January after the Sun found pictures on Facebook of him at a family fancy dress party, which the judge said showed him "behaving in a foolish and immature manner when half naked".
In his written judgment,Briggs said the decisive factor in the case was the potential for harm to Winslet's children if he granted publication.
"Finally, I have concluded that the consequences of publication, in terms of risk of harm and distress to Miss Winslet's children, are matters tending towards a conclusion that the claimant's privacy should prevail in the present case," the judge ruled.
The Sun had argued that it should be allowed to print the pictures because Rocknroll was a public figure and the pictures had been available on Facebook since 2010.
Desmond Browne QC, for the Sun, argued in the high court that the pictures of Rocknroll would not be particularly upsetting for Winslet's children because there were already dozens of images of Winslet scantily clad from her appearances in films, such as Titanic and Hideous Kinky.
The judge disagreed. He acknowledged that newspapers had a legitimate freedom of expression argument for publishing material which is "trivial or banal", but said this was at the opposite end of a "hierarchy of different types of speech" to information which contributes to genuine public debate.
The judge disagreed with the Sun's claim that Rocknroll was a public figure and therefore had a lower expectation of privacy. He described Rocknroll as "no more than a not very conspicuous middle manager in his uncle's private business empire", referring to his uncle Sir Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic, where Rocknroll used to work. Marriage to Winslet had briefly made him "something of a public figure", according to the judge, but not to the extent that he was "in the public sphere in his own right".
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