The Sun newspaper has paid monetary damages to England cricketer Ben Stokes and his mother Deborah over carrying a story that detailed a family tragedy. Deborah Stokes took legal action over the September 2019 front-page article, saying it exposed private information that was not in the public interest.
Despite defending the story published, the Sun newspaper apologized to the family for causing "great distress".
In 2019, The Sun told the BBC it had received the co-operation of a Stokes family member and added the events described in the story were "a matter of public record" and "the subject of extensive front-page publicity in New Zealand at the time".
The Sun's statement read: "On 17 September 2019 we published a story titled 'Tragedy that Haunts Stokes' Family' which described a tragic incident that had occurred to Deborah Stokes, the mother of Ben Stokes, in New Zealand in 1988.
“The article caused great distress to the Stokes family, and especially to Deborah Stokes. We should not have published the article. We apologize to Deborah and Ben Stokes. We have agreed to pay them damages and their legal costs."
Stokes was born in New Zealand and moved to Cumbria with his family aged 12. At the time, he described the article as "utterly disgusting" and the "lowest form of journalism".
“The tabloid also apologized to the pair, agreed to pay their legal costs, and issued a public statement saying the story, about an incident that took place before the cricketer was born, should never have been published," said a report in the Guardian.
The newspaper quoted Deborah as saying, “The decision to publish this article was a decision to expose and to profit from exposing, intensely private and painful matters within our family. The suffering caused to our family by the publication of this article is something we cannot forgive."
“Ben and I can take no pleasure in concluding this settlement with the Sun. We can only hope that our actions in holding the paper to the account will leave a lasting mark, and one that will contribute to preventing other families from having to suffer the same pain as was inflicted on our family by this article," she added.
(bbc.com inputs)
