"If you can't do the time, don't do the crime" - it's a common mantra and an argument that's been frequently used in the current debates about superinjunctions, and it sums up my own opinion of the matter pretty well. The case of the footballer, whose name is already widely known and will be on the front page of a Scottish newspaper tomorrow, is a good one to pick on. The footballer, who is married with children, allegedly had an affair with a reality TV contestant, and subsequently took out a superinjunction, barring any mention of the said affair in the press. The affair allegedly lasted for 7 months, and the footballer has allegedly sued his mistress for leaking the story.
That's enough "allegedly"s.
The big debate around superinjunctions is being described as a battle between an individual's right to privacy versus the right to freedom of expression, and the freedom of the press. However in my view these are not opposite ends of the same spectrum that are incompatible with one another. Individual privacy and freedom of expression can coexist hand-in-hand, even in this footballer's situation; the real question is this: who owns the information?
When two people have an affair in private, that is a private act that only the two of them are privy to. Nobody else knows about it. The information that the affair happened is known only to those two individuals. But, more importantly, the information is shared equally between those two individuals. Unless a prenuptial agreement was signed, neither one has more claim to knowing the act happened than the other, and neither one has the right to stop the other from talking about it. Granted, "kiss and tell" is a pretty sloppy way of behaving, but so is cheating on your wife and family. There's no moral high ground to be had there.
Your private life is not exclusively your private life if you share it with someone else. If you have a relationship with someone, that's their private life as well as yours, and they have the right to talk about their own private life - including that relationship with you. That's not to say you should never have any relationship with anyone, but that you ensure you trust the people you share things with, and (unlike Chris Huhne) treat them well enough to not have a reason to betray that trust. The footballer's clumsy attempts to keep the story secret - most of which have only served to draw more publicity to it - simply make no sense. Essentially he is trying to impose a prenuptial agreement that is neither prenuptial nor has the other person's agreement; whatever the law says, that cannot be right.
Something the defenders of superinjunctions draw attention to is the issue of families, especially children: that front page headlines of the footballer's affair would cause undue distress to his family, and his children could get bullied at school because of it. As a father I know the importance of protecting my children, but I'm afraid this argument doesn't wash with me for a number of reasons...
Firstly, superinjunctions are horrendously expensive, they are a plaything of the rich and famous that is unavailable to the rest of us. In any environment there is gossip, and rumours travel fast - whether or not they have any truth in them. Ordinary families who cannot afford superinjunctions have to grin and bear this kind of speculation. Their problems may not be national front page news, but the local gossiping and playground bullying is no different, and neither is the damage it causes. Superinjunctions do nothing to stop that, and even if they did, it is wrong that such a tool should only be available to those who could afford it.
Secondly, it is not the news of an extramarital affair that is damaging to a marriage - it is the extramarital affair itself. The footballer and his wife clearly have a few problems to sort out between them, and really what the rest of the world knows or thinks about them is nowhere near as important as addressing those issues as a couple. Being unfaithful is shameful, but the footballer would get far more respect from the public at large by being honest and accepting a tarnished reputation than by trying in vain to protect the false impression of him that he would prefer us all to have.
A final reason why the use of superinjunctions is just silly relates to a corollary of my main point about the owner of the information, and that's about the control of information. We're all aware of the power of spin, and therefore if you know a story is likely to leak to the press eventually it is far better to release it yourself, using your own words, and telling your side of the story, rather than allow a mass of rumour and speculation to twist it into something horrendous. Getting your own account of the news out quickly prevents the story from becoming protracted and drawn out in the way that this one has; it also reduces the value of that news to the press, thus diminishing the risk of other people from profiting at your expense by selling their version story.
Given all that, the footballer's superinjunction and subsequent attempts to protect it, when the story is already in the public domain, look very silly indeed. Instead of dousing the flames, his actions are fuelling the fire; it's a good thing he isn't a goalkeeper because he's getting his fingers well and truly burnt.
