They split the work between them. Osborne had the daunting task of phoning Clarke to officially inform him of their investigation, as they didn’t have a legal contact for him yet. “He said something like, ‘Speak to my lawyers,’ and then he hung up,” she remembers. His lawyers soon got in touch and an invitation to comment was sent to them, as well as to Bafta’s and Maza’s legal reps. “Noel came back at least twice before we published,” she adds. “One of those times he came back with quite specific rebuttals that we had to put to the women we’d spoken to. That was quite brutal.”Concurrently, the bones of the articles were being carefully constructed by Kale, with every single word considered from a legal perspective. Gill Phillips, director of editorial legal services, was their Guardian angel. “Gill would notice the smallest detail that might be wrong and she’d immediately pick up on it,” Kale says. “The worst thing in the world is for someone to put their trust in us, to tell you their story and then you mess up by getting the date wrong and the whole thing’s discredited.”Eventually, the first story about Clarke went live 18…
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Sirin Kale and Lucy Osborne: 'Some women genuinely believed their career would be destroyed'
