The High Court refused Artem Lobov’s application to restrain Conor McGregor from publishing allegedly defamatory statements, finding that Lobov had not met the first requirement for an interim injunction under section 33 of the Defamation Act 2009: that the statements be clearly defamatory.
In a judgment delivered on 23 December 2022, Mr Justice Garrett Simons considered a tweet posted on 26 November in which McGregor sang that Lobov was a “rat”. The judge said the meaning of the word depended on the context and how an ordinary reasonable reader would understand the post.
Lobov’s solicitors argued that “rat” meant an informer, a betrayer, someone who revealed confidential information or someone who double-crossed another person. The judge said that interpretation treated the word too literally and detached it from the circumstances of publication. He considered the tweet as part of a series of insults posted over the following weeks by a fighter known for “trash talking”, and said readers were more likely to see it as a rant than as a statement injuring Lobov’s reputation.
The dispute arose amid separate contractual proceedings. Lobov alleges that McGregor breached an oral agreement to pay him five per cent of the proceeds from the sale of the Proper 12 whiskey brand. The judgment says Lobov had not asked the court to treat readers as knowing about that dispute or to interpret “rat” as referring to his pursuit of the contract claim. The judge also noted that Lobov had not yet delivered a statement of claim in the defamation case and had not sworn an affidavit in support of the application.
The court’s decision concerned the request for an interim restraint, not the final determination of a defamation action. The judge refused the application after finding that the first statutory requirement was not met; he therefore did not need to decide whether McGregor had a defence likely to succeed. He also said an alleged breach of Twitter’s rules could not ground an injunction in proceedings to which Twitter was not a party.
Costs were not finally decided. The judge’s provisional view was that McGregor, having successfully resisted the application, should recover his costs. The parties were to be heard on costs and receive directions on pleadings on 11 January 2023.