Elin Nordegren Woods, the wife of champion golfer Tiger Woods, yesterday settled her libel action over an article in the September 2006 edition of The Dublinermagazine on terms including judgment in the sum of €250,000 - with half of that amount not to be paid provided certain conditions are met - and a lengthy apology to her from the magazine and its publisher, Trevor White.
A sum of €125,000 in damages was awarded over a magazine article admitted in the High Court yesterday to be "utterly false" and "cheap, tasteless and deliberately offensive". The money will be donated to cancer charities in memory of the late wife of Irish golfer Darren Clarke.
The defendants accepted the article and accompanying photograph of a naked woman wrongly alleged to be Ms Woods was "a cheap vulgar lie" which was "unforgivably insulting" to Ms Woods. "We should not have discussed Ms Nordegren Woods at all; we will never do so again," the apology concluded.
Yesterday, Donal O'Donnell SC, with Paul Anthony McDermott, for Ms Woods, told Mr Justice Eamon de Valera the action had been settled on terms which he asked the court to receive and file. The terms included judgment in the sum of €250,000, with €125,000 to be paid in staged payments over two years. The remaining amount would be stayed provided certain conditions, including publication of an apology, were met. Another condition of the settlement was the reading in court of an apology by Eoin McCullough SC, for the defendants.
In that apology, the defendants said the September 2006 article, entitled "Ryder Cup Filth for Dublin?" was published when Ms Woods was in Ireland attending the Ryder Cup with her husband, who was playing on behalf of the United States.
"The story was cheap, tasteless and deliberately offensive. It was also completely untrue. The article was accompanied by a nude photograph of a woman falsely identified as Elin Woods, and the article falsely stated that other such photographs were to be found on internet porn sites."
The apology stated the photo was not of Ms Woods and there were no such photographs of Ms Woods on internet sites or elsewhere. "Ms Nordegren Woods has never posed, or been photographed, nude. The story was utterly and comprehensively false." The apology said the story and photo was "profoundly hurtful" to Ms Woods and it was "particularly shameful" it was published when she, like thousands of others, was a guest in this country and when international media attention was focused on the event.
There "was and is no excuse for the story" and the efforts by the defendants to explain and excuse it and to make "self-serving and qualified apologies" only made matters worse, the apology stated.
The article was not "a satire" or "parody" but a "cheap vulgar lie" which was "unforgivably insulting" to Ms Woods.
"Rudimentary checks should have meant that the story was not written," the apology stated.
"Basic decency ought to have prevented the article from being published."
"We now apologise unreservedly, completely and unequivocally to Ms Nordegren Woods," the apology said.
The defendants had also agreed to pay her a substantial sum in damages and recognised Ms Woods's generosity in donating the entire sum to a charity of her choice.
"We wish to obtain the maximum publicity possible for this apology and we invite media outlets and particularly those which published the original story to give prominence to this apology," the defendants added.
