According to the court, Blick has violated the personality of Spiess-Hegglin
With its December 2014 reporting on the events following the Landammann celebration in the canton of Zug, the Blick unlawfully violated Jolanda Spiess-Hegglin’s personal rights. According to the court, there was no public interest.
Last Wednesday, the Zug Cantonal Court ruled in favor of Spiess-Hegglin's civil action against Ringier as publisher of the Blicks partially upheld. Spiess-Hegglin was awarded CHF 20,000 in compensation, as the court announced on Friday. The defense had demanded 25,000 francs.
The other applications for publication of an apology in the View or a ban on future reporting in this context in the daily newspaper was dismissed by the cantonal court insofar as it was upheld. Numerous View-articles have already been deleted from the Swiss media database SMD.
According to the judges, the violation of personality was due to the fact that the name and picture of an alleged victim of a sexual offense, i.e. intimate data, had been published. There was no overriding public interest in the publication of this data.
Furthermore, it was not relevant how Spiess-Hegglin had behaved in retrospect towards traditional and social media. Nor could the reporting be justified by the fact that it was about a local politician and a semi-public celebration. At the trial, Ringier's lawyer had argued that Spiess-Hegglin had been president of the party and had been part of Zug's political elite.
What exactly had happened was never legally clarified. The question of whether a sexual offense had actually taken place or not was not relevant to the question of whether there had been a violation of personality rights, the court held. The "Blick" had not known what had actually happened.
The proceedings did not cover claims for the surrender of the profit that the View had achieved with the violation of personality.
Ringier took note of the ruling, but stated in a statement that it did not share the views of the Cantonal Court of Zug on the two key points. Ringier is still of the opinion that the finding of a violation of personality rights was unjustified and that accordingly no compensation should be awarded. A further appeal to the High Court of the Canton of Zug is therefore being considered.
The lawsuit concerns an article that the View on December 24, 2014. In it, the tabloid showed the then Zug Canton Council members Spiess-Hegglin (Greens) and Markus Hürlimann (SVP) with their names and pictures, and ran the headline: "Sex scandal involving SVP politician: Did he ravish her?" (SDA)
