Abstract
What, if anything, justifies incursions into the private lives of public figures? In Campbell v MGN
Ltd, the House of Lords established that a public figure could have no reasonable expectation
of privacy if they made false statements to the public about their private life. In such
circumstances, in order to ‘put the record straight’, the press may legitimately intrude without
the public figure’s consent into that area of their private life about which they misled
the public. What would otherwise constitute an illegitimate intrusion into the public figure’s
private life is legally permissible if the purpose of the intrusion is to expose to the
public a falsity that the public figure had propagated about their private life. In this paper, I argue that there are strong moral and policy reasons against this
‘putting the record straight’ principle (‘PRS’). Principally, PRS
is at odds with a central purpose of the right to privacy. Under PRS, public figures who
engage in hypocrisy lose legal protection for their private life with respect to that information
about which their public pronouncements misled the public. If, as I will argue,
hypocrisy is an important (perhaps essential) expression of one’s right to privacy and tool
for protecting one’s private life then, under PRS, public figures could lose protection for
their right to privacy merely by its exercise.