Mark Stephens says party’s denials over sexual harassment claims undermine credibility of female former employees
One of the UK’s most high-profile freedom of expression lawyers has accused Labour of “spin and dissembling” for denying it attempted to stop two female ex-staffers from speaking about sexual harassment.
In a highly unusual intervention, Mark Stephens, who represented Georgie Robertson and Laura Murray, said there were “high public interests at play” and said the party was “undermining their credibility” by issuing statements denying it had tried to offer them non-disclosure agreements.
Stephens, a trustee of Index on Censorship and who sits on the FCO Free Expression advisory board, has previously worked on the McLibel case and represented Julian Assange and Salman Rushdie, leading the department at Howard Kennedy LLP.
His letter was also backed by one of the country’s leading experts in labour law, John Hendy QC, a Labour peer, who told the Guardian that he “can’t see how it would be possible to deny that [the settlement the women were offered] is anything other than ‘a non-disclosure agreement’”.
Both women worked under the previous Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and made separate complaints of sexual harassment against the same individual. One of them raised her experience in January 2020, and they both revealed their experiences in March 2020.
Robertson, a former press officer, and Murray, who was head of complaints, resigned from the party but refused to...
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