‘Claudio is scamming’ article over which Mill Media’s The Londoner is being sued
A reporter for Mill Media has been hit with an unusual £10,000 county court judgment after being sued by a businessman whose alleged dishonest conduct they have reported on.
Freelance journalist Cormac Kehoe is also being sued personally for £250,000 in libel damages alongside editor Joshi Herrmann and publisher Mill Media Ltd.
The publisher of newsletter-based local news website The Londoner has been hit with a flurry of legal letters since writing about the alleged activities of Claudio De Giovanni.
In a High Court claim form, De Giovanni, of Green Lanes in London, said the case centres on a 2 August 2025 article headlined “Claudio is Scamming”. He complained that it “accuses me of repeated criminal and dishonest conduct, alleging that I unlawfully sublet properties, earn ‘tens of thousands of pounds a month’ through deception and leave landlords with ‘electrocution, filth and broken furniture’.”
He said the allegations are “entirely false”.
The case has already cost the publisher around £20,000 in legal fees before a single High Court hearing has been held. Mill Media will attempt to get the claim dismissed at a hearing in March.
Mill Media founder Herrmann told Press Gazette the subscriptions-funded publisher stands by its reporting.
He said the story had been overseen by Mill Media investigations editor Cameron Barr, a former Washington Post managing editor , along with involvement from Herrmann, The Londoner editor Hannah Williams and the publisher’s lawyers.
“This was a super robust piece of journalism,” Herrmann said, adding: “This wasn’t a slapdash operation. It was very deeply sourced.”
More than a dozen people were spoken to for the article and Herrmann said De Giovanni was given “ample opportunity to comment”, with attempts made via email, phone, his brother and an address found through court documents.
This led to De Giovanni making a pre-publication legal threat. Herrmann said: “He threatened that he would sue us but didn’t actually deal with any of the substantiative points in the article.”
‘Really concerning’ that claimant pursued individual journalist
After publication, De Giovanni issued proceedings via Money Claim Online for “defamation, aggravated harm and loss of business” against Kehoe. A default judgment at Bromley County Court requires Kehoe to pay £10,000.
Herrmann said Kehoe was not aware of the claim at the time so was unable to contest it.
Herrmann noted that the threats were “not just against us as a company, which would be one thing, but against Cormac personally and I think that’s where this enters into really concerning territory”.
Also in August, De Giovanni applied for an injunction at the High Court trying to get the article removed. Mrs Justice Steyn dismissed the request without a hearing, saying the case was not “exceptionally urgent” because the article had been published almost a fortnight earlier, and that there was a “lack of clarity as to what words the applicant complains of”.
Hermann said Mill Media then continued to receive correspondence from De Giovanni asking for the article to be taken down and listing the supposed potential consequences of not doing so including a claim for £250,000 in damages, “criminal proceedings” for harassment and malicious communications, “a custodial sentence in the event of contempt of court or criminal conviction”, potential asset freezes and personal accountability for legal costs.
On 20 October, De Giovanni filed a defamation claim in the High Court in which he said “no credible evidence” supports the allegations against him. He said The Londoner’s reporting had caused “serious harm” and asked for £250,000 in damages.
‘Nagging sceptre of financial ruin’
Kehoe, a fellow at the Centre for Investigative Journalism, said in a statement to Press Gazette he felt The Londoner’s story “had shattered the successful persona [De Giovanni] had curated online and amongst his peers.
“A few days after we published, Claudio issued a personal claim for £5,000 against me. If The Londoner did not remove the article by 11 August, he told me, he would escalate his claim to the High Court and sue me personally for £250,000 on the grounds of defamation.
“If we were to remove the article within 24 hours though, he bargained, he would ‘drop all legal claims entirely’.
“Obviously, this was not an ideal email. It caused a good degree of stress and the nagging spectre of financial ruin haunted the back of my mind for a few months.” Mill Media is covering Kehoe’s legal costs.
He continued: “But, I knew that if journalists were to give in to every such threat we would basically cease to have a point. So here we are.”
The Londoner, which launched in October 2024, is one of several subscription, newsletter-based Mill Media titles alongside The Mill in Manchester, The Post in Liverpool, The Bell in Glasgow , The Dispatch in Birmingham and The Tribune in Sheffield.
Editor Joshi Herrmann: ‘Potentially ruinous’
Herrmann told Press Gazette: “It’s really stressful as an editor to deal with something like this, knowing that a case could be ruinous for us as a company.
“The time you have to put into it, the energy you have to put into it, the money you have to put into it, it’s really, really damaging to an independent company that does robust public interest journalism.
“We are not backing down. We are putting money behind this case,” Herrmann continued.
He also said: “He asked us to take it down in dozens of different ways and we are not going to do it because we don’t take down robust public interest journalism.”
Herrmann was among more than 120 media and legal figures who signed a letter, published on Wednesday, urging the Government to include anti-SLAPP provisions in the next King’s Speech.
The letter said that “without an effective early dismissal mechanism, an objective test for filtering SLAPPs [strategic lawsuits against public participation] out of court, and the ability to minimise costs and penalise bad conduct, courts and judges do not have the tools or guidance they need.
“At a time of unprecedented pressure on our judicial system, court resources should not be wasted on SLAPPs, which are by definition an abuse of the court process.”
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