PR consultant Monica Leech was physically sick on the side of the road after hearing crude and vulgar comments made about her by a caller to RTÉ's Livelineshow, Ms Leech told the High Court yesterday.
She was giving evidence on the second day of her action alleging she was libelled in the Irish Independent of December 17th, 2004. She claims the article repeated the completely untrue claims made by a Liveline caller and meant she had performed sexual acts for Martin Cullen in exchange for public contracts.
Ms Leech said she was listening to Liveline while driving to Dublin on December 16th, 2004 for a business appointment and was "absolutely shocked" to hear such crude words - which she claims wrongly meant she had performed sexual acts for the then minister for the environment Mr Cullen in exchange for public contracts - said about her on RTÉ.
She felt sickened, cheapened and that it was unfair.
She had pulled into the hard shoulder, was quite upset and shaking, and was physically sick.
It was "absolutely not true" that she had ever had a non-business relationship with Mr Cullen, she said.
Her husband had gone to school with Mr Cullen and would have known him much better than she did.
After the comments on Liveline, her thoughts went to her sons, one of whom was then sitting the Leaving Cert. She knew her husband would have heard the remarks.
When she arrived back in Waterford that night, she was devastated to see the faces of her husband and sons and to see how upset they were, she said.
The only reassurance that night was what had been said was over, but her brother then phoned her very early the next morning to say the Irish Independenthad repeated what was said on Liveline, Ms Leech said.
It was a day when she found it very hard to get out of bed and face into business meetings where "decent people would not meet my eyes". The article stopped people doing business with her, she said.
Her family had always bought the Irish Independent, it was the "paper of record" in their house. If it was in the Independent, it was "gospel". She knew then that, in every office she walked into that day, people would have read the paper and what was said on Liveline would be there in black and white for ever.
She was hugely offended that a paper which she held in such high regard could make a decision overnight to "shred" her reputation for "some small amusement" for themselves and the nation. The fact that the paper had inserted dots when reporting the crude words used by the caller - "s . . . ing his c . . ." - did not help because she believed it was "more memorable" that the reader had to work it out. A five-year-old child could work it out, she said.
RTÉ was "absolutely and utterly appalling" and "utterly careless with my life", she said. "I'm not a soap opera here, I'm not fair game for the amusement of people, it's my life, I don't get to live it again."
Earlier yesterday, as Paul O'Higgins SC began to ask Ms Leech about the comments made on Liveline, Ms Leech asked that her two sons, John (26) and Gareth (19), who were in court with her husband John, leave the court for that aspect of the evidence. They did so.
The case continues today.
