Unnamed aspiring lawyer sent email to uni staff
A libel claim brought by a law lecturer against a former student will proceed to trial after the High Court found that allegations she made in a complaint email to her university accused him of serious sexual misconduct.
The ruling was handed down in RAJ v MSH, a case arising from an email sent by a final-year law student to members of her uni’s registry team after she narrowly missed out on securing a 2:1 degree classification.
In a judgment on preliminary issues, Deputy High Court Judge Aidan Eardley KC found that the email alleged that the claimant had abused his academic position by pressuring the student into a sexual relationship and by engaging in “sexual acts against her will”. Both parties were granted anonymity.
According to the judgment, the claimant was a university lecturer who was, at the time, the academic lead for his university’s LLB Law and Practice course, with programme management and teaching responsibilities. The defendant was one of his students and graduated with a 2:2 after falling short of a 2:1 by two points.
Following the publication of her results in November 2020, the student emailed the uni’s registry team under the subject line “Complaint – LLB Result Classification – Urgent Review Request”.
In that email, she alleged that the lecturer’s conduct towards her deteriorated after she refused to have a sexual relationship with him and that this hostility was reflected in the marking of her work. She also claimed that she was singled out in class, including because she wore a hijab and did not socialise with him.
The judge found that the natural and ordinary meaning of the email was that: “The Claimant sexually harassed and victimised the Defendant (his student) by refusing to address complaints that the Defendant had raised unless the Defendant was prepared to get close to him, and then failing to assist her with her studies, failing to respond to a request for an academic reference, and giving her lower marks than deserved…”
The court also held that the email conveyed an allegation that: “By asking the Defendant to get close to him, the Claimant was improperly asking her to engage in a sexual relationship with him.”
The student also claimed she had been “targeted and punished by lower than deserved grades” and that the alleged harassment had caused “health problems and poor sleep which affected my study and performance”.
The lecturer brought libel proceedings on the basis that the statements complained of were statements of fact rather than opinion, and that they amounted to allegations of serious professional misconduct. He relied on the formal context of the communication, which was sent to uni officials as part of an internal complaints process.
The defendant accepted that the statements were defamatory but argued that they were predominantly expressions of opinion based on her own experiences and were intended to trigger an investigation rather than assert guilt.
The case will now proceed towards trial.