A British court has slammed a £95,000 fine on a notorious fake news merchant and self-acclaimed investigative journalist, David Hundeyin. He was found guilty of libel in a suit instituted by Charles Northcott, a British Broadcasting Corporations’ journalist.
The Royal Courts of Justice in the UK entered the judgment on October 8, 2024 in favour of the plaintiff Charles Northcott. It ordered David Hundeyin to pay Mr. Northcott the £95,000 for damages made to his reputation following the weighty allegations Hundeyin made against him in his ”Journalism Career Graveyard” article.
The court noted that David Hundeyin levelled several accusations against the British journalist including an accusation that Northcott used his position as the director of the BBC Eye programme to obtain sexual favours from Kiki Mordi. Kiki Mordi is a Nigerian Emmy-nominated journalist, who was the on-screen reporter for the BBC’s Sex for Grades documentary that aired in October 2019.
David Hundeyin repeatedly stood by his accusations, which prompted Charles Northcott to sue for libel before a British court. Even after serving Mr. Hundeyin the court processes, he refused to enter appearance before the court. The case therefore proceeded in the absence of the defendant, David Hundeyin.
In his judgment as shown by court documents, the judge stated, “I accept C’s (Charles Northcott) evidence that D’s (David Hundeyin) libel has had a very serious impact on him both professionally and personally and caused him serious harm and distress. His witness statement adopts and develops the particulars of harm pleaded in the PoC, and I accept both in their entirety.
“The court awards C £95,000 damages, including aggravated damages. This is an appropriate sum to compensate C for the damage to his reputation caused by D and to vindicate his good name; and it takes appropriate account of the distress, hurt and humiliation which D’s false and defamatory publication has caused him, as well as D’s aggravating conduct”, he ruled.
The court also ordered the website operators where David Hundeyin published the defaming article to remove the relevant part of Hundeyin’s article, which it found offensive.
BACKGROUND OF THE CONTROVERSY
Sometimes in 2019, a freelance journalist Miss Kiki Mordi collaborated with a team from the BBC to produce a 54-minute documentary, which exposed how lecturers in University of Lagos and University of Ghana took advantage of vulnerable female students, especially those with poor academic grades by demanding sexual favours in exchange for upgrade of their poor grades.
Kiki Mordi worked alongside Norcott and other journalists on the project. However, three years after the release of the documentary, David Hundeyin published an article titled ”Journalism Career Graveyard”, where he accused Norcott of having an inappropriate sexual relationship with Mordi and favoured her to work on the Sex for Grades documentary while sidelining and deceiving another journalist Oge Obi, whom Hundeyin claimed was the brain behind the BBC documentary.
In September 2022, David Hundeyin published his article on his X (formerly Twitter) handle and it went viral. According to Northcott, the post received more than 40 million online impressions between September 27 and October 31, 2022.
“I worked with a colleague to run an analysis of the defamatory Article, and its associated hashtags and tweets by Mr Hundeyin, to see how far it had spread between 27 September and 31 October 2022. This analysis suggested the content had received more than 40 million online impressions during this period (which are calculated by tracking the total number of times the content was displayed across Twitter on users’ feeds and on search results). A large percentage of these would have been abroad, but a very significant proportion of Mr Hundeyin’s followers are in England and Wales. He was educated here, has been invited to speak publicly here … and he’s launched two books here – which are sold in British bookstores,” Northcott’s statement read.
In fact after publishing the said defamatory article, Hundeyin made several posts on his X handle where he tagged Mordi’s handle on X, daring her and others who had issues with his defamatory publication to sue him. He doubled down each time on his accusations against Charles Northcott and even posted a video of Northcott and Mordi climbing onto the base of a statue in Trafalgar Square.
Charles Northcott consequently sued David Hundeyin for libel, stating that his actions seriously impacted his career and caused him damages. The court held that, “all of D’s behaviour post-publication comfortably falls within the principles in relation to aggravated damages that I outlined earlier. D, having seriously libelled C, then embarked upon a campaign of trolling and persecution in a manner calculated to cause C and Ms Mordi maximum distress and damage. Moreover, he has failed to take down the Article as ordered by this court in July.”
The court noted that the video showed nothing to corroborate the Defendant’s allegations of an inappropriate sexual relationship. It added that Hundeyin’s behaviour post-publication comfortably fell within the principles of aggravated damages and trolling, which caused Mordi and Northcott distress.
NEW TWIST REVEALS DAVID HUNDEYIN DATED AND MARRIED OGE OBI FOR TWO MONTHS
The court document showed in a paragraph that David Hundeyin had a brief relationship culminating in marriage in August 2021 but later separated shortly after. David Hundeyin confirmed this new information in a recent post on his X handle, where he said: “Oh and not that I owe anyone this information, but Oge Obi and I were in fact (very) briefly married. We got married in August 2021 and separated in September 2021. If you read my book ‘Breaking Point,’ you’d already (sic) what happened.”
This led many to accuse David Hundeyin of being blinded by emotion when he started accusing Northcott and Kiki Mordi of stealing Oge Obi’s work on the Sex for Grades project. David Hundeyin sometime in December 2020 also claimed he just heard about Oge Obi for the first time the previous week. This claim is now being questioned by many on social media and who by extension are questioning the veracity of Hundeyin’s accusations against Northcott and Kiki Mordi.
In his defence, Hundeyin in the recent post of his X handle said that the defamatory story against Northcott and Kiki Mordi was published in September 2022, a year after his acrimonious separation with his wife Oge Obi, insisting that the story was not motivated by personal interest.
“The story in question was published in September 2022, over a year after our (very acrimonious) breakup, so I know some people are itching to discredit my story by claiming that it was motivated by my personal interest (David was defending his wife), but the facts of the matter state the exact opposite”, Hundeyin wrote.
It has also been reported elsewhere that the marriage between Oge Obi and David Hundeyin produced a child with many saying that a child obviously cannot be conceived and delivered within a month. They suggest that David Hundeyin and Oge Obi continued to maintain some close relationship even after their separation. This, they claim is enough personal interest for Hundeyin to launch a defamatory attack on his ex-wife’s perceived adversaries.