Bailey speaks of 'dirty, rotten, stinking lies'

Ian Bailey spoke out today about “the dirty, rotten, stinking lies” that were printed about him that damaged him ten years ago and are still damaging him now.

Before his cross-examination began, Mr Bailey made several general comments on the effect that the newspaper articles complained of had on him.

“I haven’t been able to get any work. I am completely stymied in that.

"Now survival – getting here today – is very difficult. Sometimes words fail me. They shouldn’t, I am a wordsmith, a journalist, but it has been torture,” he said.

His senior counsel Tom Creed asked him why he did not leave West Cork.

“That is often asked. My view always was and still is, I was never going to run away. Neither was this going to go away. I was always going to have to deal with this. It was something that had to be dealt with. My being here is part of this process of dealing with it. People are pointing the finger at me because of articles like this.

“This seems to go to the whole basis of the situation I found myself in when I was arrested. I know evidence was falsified. She (one of the journalists) refers to “my unproven innocence”.

"In our law we have a presumption of innocence. I have had that right removed from me by this series of articles. I am trying to prove the negative, it is almost an impossibility. How did this situation occur?”

Bailey, 50, lost his libel action against The Daily Telegraph, Times (and Sunday Times) Irish Sunday Independent, Independent on Sunday and The Star, three years ago, and yesterday was the third day of his appeal to the High Court, where Mr Justice Brian McGovern is presiding at Courtroom Four in the Washington Street courthouse in Cork.

Bailey this afternoon denied telling a teenager shortly after the murder of Sophie Toscon du Plantier: “I went up there with a rock one night and bashed her f***ing brains in.”

Mr Bailey denied yesterday that he said that to Malachy Reed, who was 14 years old at the time.

Describing a conversation he had with the teenager to whom he gave a lift, he recalled: “He asked me how things were going. I said, things were going fine until newspapers started to say I committed the murder.”